Question

This is a question for anyone. It can be asked of someone with different religious beliefs, because I am not very familiar with non Judeo-Christian religions. So the answer could be given in the context of those teachings. But religious beliefs become our own, so that even within the same religion, different individuals would have different ways of grappling with and answering questions such as this one.

In my job, I basically spend my time plumbing the depths of the human condition. And I mean humanity in the absolute raw: physical bodily functioning with all its frailties and shortcomings. I’ve learned that as a general rule, the best thing is usually a balance between extremes. What I have been lacking is soaring among the ivory towers of humanity: art, music, philosophy and such. I'm imbalanced in many senses of the word.

I left my job in Pediatrics because I could not put my feelings away in a little box. I could not give to the patients and their families the support and compassion they needed and deserved without me stumbling over my own grief and fear. I was immobilized by it. Struck dumb. Those that could put their feelings aside, they were truly the most selfless people I have ever met. They put their desire to reach out, to touch, to help another above and beyond their own sense of self preservation. I could not leave myself open to that pain, so I knew it was better for the patients if I found somewhere else to work that was less of an emotional blitzkrieg. Thus the adult ICU. At least most of those people have led long lives, graced with lots of gifts (which they hopefully recognized). And if they die early or alone, it's usually due to their lifestyle and choices.

As much as I hate my job, I wouldn’t trade the experiences and perspective it has given me for the world. For most of us health care workers, it all becomes “just another day at the office.” We tend to forget our initial reactions to the whole expereince. The horror at the depths of suffering people experience. The excruciating pain of procedures, of the disease process itself, of laying there immobilized with your belly cut wide open and a Gore-Tex mesh holding your guts in. The shame and embarrassment people feel because their defenses and barriers are completely gone (being allowed to go there is a privilege most people won’t even afford their closest family, but we tend to see it as a burden rather than the privilege it is).

Sometimes they beg for death. Sometimes they get their wish. And sometimes that’s the best thing.

But along with all the bad comes the amazing. I've borne witness to the height of love, which is almost never realized until a loss is imminent.

As I said, sometimes the losses are the best thing. But what about the times when they’re not? There’s the story of the baby boy who had short-gut syndrome, which basically means that he was born without parts of his intestines and liver. He spent his short life lying listless and jaundiced in a hospital crib, fed through tubes and subjected to frequent and painful procedures, only to die 8 months later by hemorrhaging out of every orifice.

So here comes the big question- what is the reason for this? What does your religion tell you? How do you personally answer this question?

I ask because, seeking the answer to this question was the only way for me to deal with what happened to some of my patients. My “faith” basically went the way of Santa Claus around the time I entered college. It was so easy to believe in and be comforted by faith when I was little, but I have not felt that in years. In college I learned that everything was not black and white as I had been taught. I could not apply my upbringing to figure out the grey areas- something may be right in one situation and wrong in another. Or the fact that some bad people go to church every Sunday and some good people never go. Some spectacularly good people, like Gandhi, are in a different religion altogether. And then there's the absolute clusterfuck that the “religious right” has introduced into American politics. I know that the “religion” (or a bunch of power-hungry old men) should not be confused with the faith, and that most of the religious leaders and bible-bangers do not embody the characteristics of the man they claim to worship.

So, participation in the ceremony of a particular organized religion did not seem to be the guaranteed ticket to heaven anymore. But I had enough experiences while in the Santa Claus phase that I cannot just dismiss the whole thing- I know just as deeply as I know my name that there's something higher out there. But does it have any control or even any interest in what happens to us?

I have a lot of knowing and very little believing. The advantage to this is that my adult worldview was arrived at mostly through intellectual means- weighing the value of various constructs like free will, service and compassion, and coming up with a set of beliefs that I hold because they resonate true within me, not because they were imposed upon me. But because religion was once so important to me, I can't just let it go. So I'm trying to fit what I think of Christianity back into this worldview like trying to find the right pegs to fit into holes.

I am trying to reason myself back into it, in other words.

Christianity offers a lot of conveniently well-fitting pegs. “Blessed are those who suffer and mourn,” and “The last shall be first.” This seems to tell me that all those children who suffer will be rewarded by getting into Heaven. The more one suffers, the more their celestial savings account is built up, and those people are practically guaranteed a spot. The ones who have to worry are the ones like myself who have a pretty easy (or “blessed”) life, because it is incumbent upon us to deposit into our own celestial savings accounts by making conscious decisions to be good, help others (feed the hungry, clothe the poor) and so on.

Many people ask, “Why does God let this happen?”

Who would hold the price
On the heads of the innocent children
If there’s some immortal power to control the dice?
(Roll the Bones, Rush)

Well, I think free will (a.k.a., the fall from Eden) explains it. The world was set spinning (in a manner of speaking) subject to certain laws like gravity. This includes the enormous variety of human attributes caused by genetic mutation. We can, if we choose to, control our own behavior (as long as the test is weighted to allow for the effects of nature and nurture). I think many things blamed on God or fate for are actually caused by people: wars, a system for acquiring food that is grossly skewed in favor of the “haves,” pollution and lifestyles that cause disease, and so on. There is still some left unexplained, but that just represents a lack of knowledge on our part. Like labeling epileptics as possessed.

Bu all these attempts to reason with myself do not really get me where I want to be, which is having faith. My grandfather had faith. One day he was visiting my brother’s house and he saw a tank full of baby fish. He exclaimed how he was in awe of the Creator, to have made such a wonder. How many people would have that as their gut reaction to a tank full of baby Mollies? When he thought he was dying, he called a priest, not 9-1-1.

Does your religion offer any insights on my dilemma?

Sometimes I think I would give my right arm for my grandfather's kind of faith. I can only imagine with the direst longing the kind of contentment and peace that would bring.