Suffering: Never Expected, but We're Always Ready (for someone else's suffering...)

This morning we awoke to a horrible crime, the mass shooting in Florida.  Regular exposure to suffering is inescapable...especially in the era of internet media.  The ugly face of pain, death, blood, hate comes straight to us unbidden.  Yet like an addict, we feel compelled to click, to learn more.

I can only imagine the chaos and the horror of being happy and spending time with friends, and suddenly life turns completely upside down.  Some lives end in a moment, not even aware that they have been snuffed out--their last thoughts about the joke their friend just told, or that they need to order another drink, or that they really ought to get going, it's late.  Others linger for a little while, and then end in full awareness of what happened, in pain, in confusion, realizing that their lives are ending.  Others, wounded in body, either make a full physical recovery or a partial one, to live out the rest of their lives bearing the scars of this night.  And all those there--and all of the families of the ones there--forever changed, forever scarred in invisible ways.

We say life isn't supposed to be this way, this is madness, this is unusual, this is outside of norms.  We see red, we see blackness--our minds reel at the horror.  Fifty dead?  Fifty fellow human beings, snuffed out in a moment.  We can make no sense of it, we seek order out of this chaos.  These events do not come with some narration that explains everything--except the narration of the talking heads on all forms of media, and our own inner narration either nodding in agreement with them or rebelling against them.

Nearly all of us have "the right answer" for these kind of atrocities.  Indeed, we have them held in ready for such kinds of inevitable situations, like a newspaper editor who makes sure she has on hand up-to-date obituaries of sick or elderly glitterati so they can be published as soon as the deaths are confirmed.  Those closest to the situation--the living victims and their families--do not have the luxury to reflect on the philosophical and theological meaning of these events--their carefully crafted "right answers" have fled, and in their place is just confusion, pain, and bewilderment.

Those of us who are far off, though--we still have the ability to recall our inner narratives to explain this evil.  So we pontificate and recite the carefully-rehearsed lines we have spoken many times in our minds, on Facebook, in Blogs.

We begin by saying "Let us mourn with the victims and their families.  This is not a time to judge or to pontificate."  And we respect that--at least for five minutes or so, and then dive straight into whatever hobbyhorse we want to enlist this tragedy to support.  Take your pick--issues on the left or the right--each tragedy is rich with opportunities for confirmation bias of our own positions.  As the story unfolds--no matter how it unfolds--we will say (inside if not out loud) "See?  I told you so.  This just proves my point on X, Y, and Z, and why you need to agree to my interpretation of events."

I'll say it again:  this happens, no matter how it unfolds.  Before the shooter was identified, there was the possibility that he was motivated by (a) ISIS or some other formal or informal Islamic terrorist organization; (b) right-wing homophobic terrorism; (c) someone who knew a particular victim and was enraged because of something that victim did/did not do; (d) a disgruntled former worker at the bar; (e) just some nut that randomly chose that bar on that night; or (f) through (zzz) a multitude of other possibilities.  But for all of these events, we have an inner narrative.

How rare is it for someone to say "Wow.  I guess this is evidence that maybe I'm wrong about some of my presuppositions.  Maybe I need to re-think a few things.  Maybe what someone else is saying is more accurate."  Our initial thoughts (and those of the talking heads)--which may be wildly inaccurate--go down the memory hole, forgotten misses of our lofty thrones of judgment where our presuppositions lie unchallenged.

Even Job's patience was finally broken when he himself had experienced overwhelming suffering.  His friends, sure--they had plenty of ready narratives on why he suffered and how best Job should address his suffering.  But in the end, God did not confirm the biases of Job or his friends.  And that is deeply unsettling on our own sense of ought.

Selah.