Windowless Rooms

Stephen Mitchell

It rarely enter the teacher workroom at my school. It is small, windowless, and white, lit by four-foot fluorescent bulbs that cast a pale, cold light. In the wintry chill I am never at ease. Recently though, I went in to make photo copies. On the counter lay an evangelical magazine open to an article that read “Shattered to Share.” Scanning just a few lines confirmed my suspicions. The author was trying to answer that age-old question: why do the innocent suffer?

His story was tame. A hooligan had thrown a rock through his windshield. He called a glazier, had the window repaired, and told the man about Jesus. Then he had an epiphany! This was the reason God had allowed his window to be broken: So he could tell another soul about Jesus!

Then he had another epiphany: Here too was the reason for so much of the suffering in this world. In essence, if not in word, he declared that God kills the children of his followers, strikes wives and husbands with cancer, destroys cities in earthquakes, and wreaks general havoc with human lives so that believers can tell non-believers about Jesus. That’s it—that’s the meaning of suffering.

I do not accept this answer. It is too easy and feels like the gates of a prison shutting me in. How do I escape or resist suffering that happens for a good reason? Am I really to conclude that between the inconvenience of a shattered windshield and the wracking death of a cancer victim there is an unbroken continuum with differences only of degree? Or is there not a world—perhaps a nasty one—lying between broken glass and broken bodies, between shattered windows and shattered lives or crippled psyches?

The author of “Shattered to Share” didn’t think so. Nor is he alone. In a recent chapel service at my Christian high school, a visiting minister told the students that God brings them suffering for one of two reasons:

(1)To teach them patience.
(2)To prepare them to help another through suffering.

I thought of the two girls in the audience whose mothers had died of cancer that year. I thought of my mother-in-law whose life was ebbing away as cancerous growths attacked breast, bone, brain, lungs, and liver. I wondered how anyone could ask these women to love a God who would act like this. Wouldn’t it make more sense—given the power we typically ascribed to him—for God to stop the suffering rather than add to it?

Yet this pastor was in fine company. We can go back at least as far as the book of Job to find pious explanations. Job’s friends come to help him, to comfort him, to endure his trial with him. But they end up blaming him for his suffering. Well-intended though they are, each claims a wisdom no one really possesses—the wisdom to explain this world’s inscrutable ways.

Answering the question is tempting though. Even the great theologians have braved it. In The City of God, St. Augustine declares that the Christian women raped by barbarian invaders were allowed to suffer because they were too proud of their own virginity. God—in his graciousness—was humbling them. 

Theologians as fine as Augustine make me uneasy. I wonder if his genius perceives something I’ve missed. But though he troubles me, I insist that on this occasion he has not spoken well of God.

Some 1500 years later, Dostoevsky resisted similar consolations. The character speaking is Ivan who refuses to accept that suffering in this world serves some purpose. If it does, that purpose is cruel—just as cruel as any purpose for which I might choose to make another suffer. Both Ivan (who rejects God) and Alyosha (who embraces him) know this.

“Imagine,” says Ivan, “that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one [innocent human] . . . would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? . . . “No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.” (The Brothers Karamazov, Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004, 227)

So the Christian joins the rebel to protest injustice and the false consolations that claim to know why we suffer. Ivan’s protest is all the more powerful because he does not dally in the realm of the inconvenient—the realm of shattered car windows—but goes to the heart of the real question: the gratuitous suffering of children—murder, abuse, torture.

Did God allow the Russian nobleman in Dostoevsky’s story to set his dogs upon an eight-year old boy so that the boy could later testify to the love of Jesus? The boy died. Did he do it so the mother could—the mother who was forced to watch?

Do we dare to answer? A yes would be arrogant and ridiculous; a no would land us back into the realm of meaningless suffering, that horror from which we hide—often, according to Camus, behind shoddy reasons.

“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger” (Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Vintage International, 1983, 6).

Is this the reason we explain suffering? Because meaningless evil is too haunting?

If so, are we speaking as Christians when we insist that God has good reasons for suffering? Or have we disguised as piety what are constructions of our human wills—windowless rooms erected to hide the horror of evil? Is the Christian hope founded upon the promise of a good explanation for suffering as if we will exclaim “Oh, that’s why my daughter was raped! Good thinking, God!”?

Isn’t the Christian hope founded, instead, on the promise that suffering will be abolished, that its absurdity will be resolved not into a meaningful plan but by banishment when God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes?

Camus, rejecting reason, turns to will to cope with the darkness of this world. From now on humans must create their own meaning, pushing their unbearable rocks up the mountain: “Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well [emphasis mine]. . . . The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (123).

Like Sisyphus, the author of “Shattered to Share” concludes that all is well. Admitting that Christians live by hope, he claims, nonetheless, to discern the reason for what happened to him and claims his explanation as part of his faith. One must imagine him happy.

But it isn’t faith and it isn’t happy.

To grasp after some reason, to bring some measure of understanding to an experience of horror is to foray into the unknown. They are our best efforts to make our own meaning. But reasons for suffering justify that suffering. They imply that what happened was really okay. Ultimately, they deny the evil of evil. Such reasons are no great insult when they explain a shattered window; they are cruel when they try to explain a shattered life.

Still, I’ve not suffered all that much. The darkest time of my life was the depression I lived with in college. It followed on the heels of romantic heartbreak. I thought I loved a girl who was certain she did not love me. Convinced that I would never recover, I lurked about in an indignant gloom for a year and a half, writing wretched poetry and recording long, introspective journal entries about my meaningless life. I revived long enough to fall in love with another girl who was as firmly convinced as the last that she did not love me. Though all of this is quite common, I felt abandoned by the world and by God, trapped in a universe that thwarted my grasp after meaning.

During that time I got, in a manner of speaking, very religious. I wondered why God allowed my hopes to be dashed, why he kept me from the girl I loved. I read the Psalms, Job, Camus, and Dostoevsky, looking for some answer to the mystery of evil. I asked God what he was trying to teach me and assured myself that he had some great plan for my life.

Really, though, none of this mattered. Deep down, I wanted neither a reason for my loneliness nor whatever good might come of it. Rather, I wanted it to end. The only thing close to consolation was the hope that I would someday be loved back. It is Alyosha’s hope in the resurrection. It is Job’s cry for a mediator who can take hold of God and man.

Neither reason nor will can account for our lives. We need something more. No world whose meaning rests wholly upon human shoulders or whose purpose can be fully and finally named has room enough for the human soul. An existentialist like Camus could make his own meaning—though he had to do so without recourse to a cosmic reason. And what he made was all the meaning for which he could hope, a windowless room lit by the pale weak light of human will. 

But Christians cannot remain in this or any other room, for the meaning of our lives lies in the mouth of God. That meaning remains open, unspoken, and unfinished, while we remain people of hope, not people of reason or will.

Our world has been terribly shattered. Though we sometimes love one another despite its cracks, we are not shattered in order to share. I will never slap my forehead and exclaim over the brilliance or beauty of a cosmic plan that requires someone to drop bombs, rape women, or abuse children. I hope to see the end of these things and the deep wounds they leave on our world healed.
—Stephen Mitchell lives with his wife and two children in Mount Holly, North Carolina, where he reads, gardens, teaches English, and tries (with occasional success) not to darken counsel by words without knowledge.