Our Lady of the Lost and Found Read online

  Even the so-called facts are uncertain. In various accounts, the British troops are said to have numbered anywhere from eight thousand to fifteen thousand and the Americans from fifteen hundred to five thousand. As Mary pointed out, the casualty counts are similarly contradictory. And yet in each history book the numbers are put forth without admission of doubt. How can we ever know for sure? We cannot go back and count the bodies again. Perhaps history, then, is simply a matter of choosing a story and sticking to it. You might argue that the numbers don’t really matter, that in war it’s not how you play the game that counts but only who wins and who loses. Remember that while it was a victory for the Americans, for the British it was a defeat. Remember that, at the time, the numbers did matter, both to those who died and those who didn’t. Remember that, at the time, while some citizens of Louisiana hailed Andrew Jackson as a conquering hero and honored him with parties and parades, others called him the Butcher of New Orleans.

  Following the uncertainty principle, it is not only beauty that lies in the eye of the beholder. But also victory, integrity, honor, truth, blood.

  I have recently found a picture of a painting of the Battle of New Orleans by an American artist named Eugene Louis Lami. It is a poor reproduction and the details are unclear. Against a gray foggy sky the American flag stands proudly erect. Smoke billows at the base of the flagpole. I can see the American troops to the right of the flag and the British to the left. I can see one British soldier in his red coat falling backward off a white horse. I can see another American flag and a warship in the harbor. I cannot see the blood.

  Months after Mary had left, on the evening of one of those days when I was obsessing over the uncertainty principle and all its ramifications, there happened to be a Physics category in the second round of Jeopardy! When the middle contestant, an exuberant young lawyer from Rhode Island named Dan, selected the 600 question in that category, it said something like: According to the uncertainty principle the position and this of a subatomic particle cannot be accurately measured at the same time.

  —Momentum! I cried, leaping off the couch in my excitement.

  But not one of the three contestants would even hazard a guess. The allotted time for an answer passed in pregnant silence, the buzzer rang, and Alex Trebek revealed the correct response.

  —Momentum, he said sadly. His disappointment was palpable.

  I felt momentarily smug, superior, somehow confirmed in my own brilliant grasp of the universe.

  Young Dan won the game anyway, having amassed 11,800 in half an hour. He was the only contestant to correctly answer the Final Jeopardy question, which said: 1 of 2 women to appear most often on the cover of Time magazine, they are separated by 2000 years. His correct answer was the Virgin Mary. The other woman, Alex Trebek said, was Princess Diana and they have both appeared eight times.

  For the whole rest of the evening, I felt inordinately pleased with myself for knowing the answers to both these questions. Obviously, whether we ever get to be on Jeopardy! or not, we can all live quite happily without knowing how many times Mary has appeared on the cover of Time and without knowing the exact measurements of the momentum and position of subatomic particles.

  Still it is worth trying to understand how the uncertainty principle applies to all areas of thought, life, longing, and faith. It all depends, I suppose, on how comfortable you are with uncertainty, how fond you are of mystery, how willing you are to make the quantum leap that faith requires.

  Doubt

  —When I was younger, Lucian said: and so much more confident, I was entranced by praying. I soared upwards on wings. But now I’m older, I find God through doubt as much as through belief. We search for him in the darkness. I’m full of doubts. That’s what faith means.

  —Michèle Roberts, Impossible Saints

  Each evening after dinner Mary and I sat together in the living room and she told me her stories. Then at ten o’clock we sat silently in our overstuffed armchairs in my comfortable house and watched the news, witnessing that day’s anthology of horrendous but familiar stories of murder and mayhem. Each evening, the anchorwoman, dressed in a series of brightly colored stylish outfits, brought us details and images of various crimes, accidents, scandals, famines, disasters, and wars, adjusting her facial expression and tone of voice according to the magnitude of each horror being reported.

  Each evening somewhere in the world a natural disaster was occurring, a multiple murder had been discovered, a revolution was taking place, a plane crash was being investigated, a genocidal massacre was in progress, a child had been neglected, abandoned, abused, abducted, raped, murdered, or starved to death. Each evening somewhere in the world a war was breaking out or continuing and hundreds of thousands of refugees were fleeing their homelands.

  Each evening I was distressed, disgusted, outraged, and frightened by all that was going on in the world.

  After the news we took turns making our ablutions in the bathroom and then we went to bed. I knew from past experience that watching the news right before bed is seldom conducive to falling quickly and smoothly into a deep and peaceful sleep. But still, it was a hard habit to break, a habit that had become a compulsion, fostered perhaps by my growing sense of a moral obligation to pay attention, for better or worse.

  If I had expected Mary to explain to me why these atrocities keep happening day after day after day, I was wrong. During the newscast, she would occasionally sigh and cross herself. But she said nothing. And I went to bed each night no more able to make sense of things than I had ever been.

  On the first afternoon of her visit, Mary had said she probably had more faith in me than I had in myself, more faith in me than I had in her.

  She was right. The truth was that no matter how much I might long to become one of the faithful, still I had not managed it. I believed in God but I had no faith.

  Much as I understood, at least theoretically, the difference between belief and faith, still I did not understand the difference between faith and blind faith. I could not think about faith without also entering into the labyrinth of doubt and uncertainty. If your eyes are open, I wondered, how can you possibly have faith? If there is such a thing as blind faith, for most people, it is no longer a tenable position. We know too much, see too clearly, watch the news and shake our heads. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we have all been faced too many times with too many wars and too many crimes. Day after day, we have seen the slaughter of the innocents. Night after night, we have seen the bodies and the blood. We have seen with our own two eyes the perpetrators of such evils and we have seen the victims and the survivors too.

  On Thursday evening, Mary and I watched an interview with the parents of a twelve-year-old girl who had been missing for twenty-seven days and then her body was found in a junkyard on the outskirts of their small, sleepy town. She had been raped, stabbed, and then hacked to pieces. Her body parts had been stuffed inside an abandoned refrigerator.

  Why do I remember that the pretty mother was wearing a pale yellow sweater and the handsome father, a crisp blue dress shirt? They were sitting in their living room, holding hands and crying. Why do I remember that their couch, like mine, was green?

  The mother said it was their faith in God that would help them through this tragedy.

  —God is good, she said through her tears. He comforts us and gives us strength.

  —But why then, I wondered with angry indignation, as we have all wondered, why then did God let such a thing happen in the first place?

  And what about the forces of nature turned malignant and murderous? What about earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, and floods? We have all watched the survivors of these various disasters weeping in front of the wreckage of their homes, their villages, their cities, their lives. Such events are commonly called “acts of God.” In theological circles, they are referred to as acts of “physical evil” or “natural evil,” meaning evil that is nobody’s fault, evil that just happens. In my head, I k
now this means that the suffering caused by such events is evil, while the events themselves are “natural,” simply a part of nature. But this phrase strikes me as an oxymoron: How can evil be natural? Sometimes I try to leave God out of it and blame Mother Nature instead. But if God is all-powerful, then he must be in charge of Mother Nature too. So in my heart, the question I have to ask is still the same: Why did God let this happen?

  What about illness, so many people cut down in their prime by disease; so many children in cancer wards, hairless and brave with big eyes and trembling smiles; so many old people in nursing homes losing their minds to the ravages of Alzheimer’s, unable to feed themselves, dress themselves, or remember their grandchildren’s names? What about AIDS? What about birth defects, babies born without arms, legs, eyes, brains? These diseases and afflictions are also considered to be events of “natural evil.” But I cannot see how there is anything natural about them.

  What about plane crashes, car wrecks, train derailments, sinking ships? These are called acts of “accidental evil.” This and natural evil are distinguished from “moral evil,” those acts intentionally committed by one human being upon another. Examples of moral evil are apparently unlimited. Some of them are unthinkable. What about terrorism and torture? What about twelve students and one teacher massacred at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, on April 20, 1999?

  What about the Holocaust?

  We have all found ourselves grieving for strangers, past and present, living and long dead, grieving and wondering why God saw fit to put them through this. We have all heard the platitude that God does not give us more than we can handle. But how are we supposed to believe this? Study history, watch the news, look at the suicide statistics, visit your local mental institution and stare into the faces of all those people who could not handle what God gave them.

  At one time and another, we have all had our doubts. We have all found ourselves furious with God, on our own or someone else’s behalf.

  I think I have lost my way in the conundrum of theodicy: If God is all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing, then why do such things happen? Why, for that matter, is there evil in the world at all? Since the beginning of recorded history and probably before, these questions have preoccupied philosophers and theologians of every culture—not to mention less cerebral people who make their livings not as thinkers but as farmers, doctors, hairdressers, engineers, mechanics, musicians, and fiction writers.

  Far greater minds than mine have not been able to answer these questions.

  Maybe the question of evil is the central mystery of existence, even more fundamental and pervasive than that other ubiquitous question: What is the meaning of life? Maybe these two questions are so inherently entwined as to be inseparable. If it weren’t for the undeniable presence of evil in the world, then maybe the question of meaning would not come up, at least not so often. If everything and everybody was good, then maybe the meaning of life would be self-evident. It could be our futile efforts to make sense of evil that lead us to ask what it all means. They are both essentially religious questions. When we ask, What is the meaning of life?, maybe what we are really asking is, Why does evil exist? I am not suggesting that evil is what gives life meaning. I am suggesting that it is evil that throws the meaning of life into question.

  Perhaps our persistent need to ask these questions about evil and meaning is the best evidence of the fact that faith, while often apparently absurd, is also unavoidable. Faith, along with food, water, and shelter, is one of the basic needs of humanity. Faith is an instinct for self-preservation just like the others. We all want and need to think about evil. We all want and need to believe that our lives have purpose and meaning. We all want and need to believe in something greater than ourselves.

  Some philosophers have said that since God created everything in the universe, he must also have created evil. Since God himself is all-good and everything he created is also all-good, then, these thinkers say, evil must be a necessary part of the good. I cannot follow this argument very far.

  Others have suggested that God cannot be held responsible for evil because he did not create it. But in the Bible, he says he did just that: I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. This quote is from the King James Version. In some later versions, the wording has been changed, its implication softened or hedged somewhat. In the New Revised Standard Version, it says: I make weal and create woe, and in the New International Version: I bring prosperity and create disaster. Call it what you will, in these words God would seem to be saying that he is responsible.

  With Mary sound asleep (I presumed) in the next room, I lay in bed and thought about evil. I did not know what I thought. I think about evil now and I still do not know what I think. I do believe that there have been (and still are) people in the world who could be considered the embodiment of pure evil. Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka: these are the names that come immediately to mind. The list goes on.

  I am no Pollyanna, but still I cannot bring myself to believe that we all have evil, or the capacity for it, lurking within us. I use the word evil here carefully, as distinguished from a multitude of lesser sins: greed, lust, envy, unkindness, indifference, selfishness, anger, stupidity, and the making of mistakes. I know that I am as capable of committing any or all of these sins as the next person.

  I imagine evil existing not within us but lurking somewhere out there in the universe, gathering in putrid pockets like a noxious gas just waiting to be released.

  I imagine evil as being something like a black hole in space. The renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has estimated that there may be more than 100 billion black holes in our galaxy. By definition, a black hole begins as a massive celestial body, a gigantic star that contracts to a very small size with enormous density. The star is crushed and swallowed by the sheer force of its own gravitational field. The star then disappears, but the gravitational field remains, sucking in anything and everything that comes near, including light. Anything consumed by the abyss of a black hole is gone forever, sucked irretrievably into this celestial heart of darkness.

  I imagine evil as operating in much the same way, sucking in anyone who comes near and then devouring them. The person disappears but the force of evil remains. Like a ship lost in the Bermuda Triangle, anyone consumed by evil is lost forever.

  Every night I watch the news and I realize that in comparison to other people’s tragedies, mine are small. But still they are mine. And so sometimes I hold them close to my heart, feed them, foster them, and let them grow big enough to get the better of me. By that point, I am fairly dripping with self-pity. It oozes from my pores like oil, spreading like a slick over everything so that nothing is immune to its amorous thrall.

  Sometimes I feel depressed for no good reason. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself more on principle, it seems, than anything else. I know full well that if you look hard enough at your own life, you can always find something wrong with it. There are times when it seems that the quickest way to be sure I don’t get what I want is to pray for it. If it is true that God always has my best interests at heart and that he knows what I need before I even ask, then why, I have often wondered, are what I think I need and what he thinks I need always two completely different things? I am not the only person who has noticed this. As the prophet Jeremiah put it in the seventh century B.C.: When you look for light, he turns it into gloom, and makes it deep darkness.

  I sometimes get more than a little tired of what strikes me as God’s overly developed sense of irony.

  But then I watch one of those television documentaries, one of those twenty-minute true stories on a newsmagazine about people surviving terrible tragedies, overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, enduring unspeakable torment, and emerging triumphant.

  Mary and I watched a few of these programs together. One of them was about an extremely successful athlete who
had been left a paraplegic after a car accident. He was struck by a drunk driver two blocks from his home while jogging to the corner store to buy milk. The drunk was not injured.

  The athlete in his wheelchair also said that it was his faith in God that gave him the strength to carry on. The interviewer asked him if he ever wondered why God had let such a terrible thing happen to him.

  —Before the accident my life was perfect, this man said. I had a tremendously successful career, a wonderful wife, three lovely children, a beautiful home filled with trophies, a garage filled with sports cars, and lots of money in the bank. I had all that and I never once asked: God, why me? So how can I ask it now?

  Often I am cured of my own malaise by watching these programs. I am uplifted and moved to joyful tears by these demonstrations of the triumph of the human spirit. My depression lifts, my problems put themselves back into perspective, and I feel, if not invincible, at least strong enough to carry on.

  But sometimes these stories just make me feel guilty for being so miserable about my own minor problems. I was not emotionally, verbally, physically, or sexually abused as a child. I have never been raped. I do not have a terminal illness. I have never been in a serious car accident, a war, a plane crash, a tornado, an earthquake, a flood, or a hurricane. No one I know has ever been murdered, kidnapped, tortured, or forced to flee their homeland. The only dead body I have ever seen was that of my maternal grandfather at his funeral and he looked very nice in his coffin in his navy blue suit with all that ruched white satin around him.