Everything Happens for a Reason....

by Marilyn Moore

"Everything happens for a reason…" and then the voice trails away, because there really doesn’t seem to be a reason, and there’s not much more to say.  Many times this phrase is uttered in the most tragic of circumstances, such as a young parent who dies and leaves behind a grieving spouse and bereft children, or an accident claims the life of the most beloved member of your group of friends, or the highly-sought after elected position goes to someone else…those times when people gather in silence, and shake their heads, and someone says, “Well, everything happens for a reason,” and it’s supposed to be comforting, but it isn’t….

Sometimes those words are said in moments of great confusion, those times when everything is sideways and upside down.  Sometimes they’re said to convey the message that God or Allah or Yahweh or the Higher Power has caused a great shakeup to get our attention, to send a message. 

I’ve heard those words recently in reflection on the time in which we live now, a time in this country marked by a pandemic that we cannot or will not control and wide-spread unrest about social injustice and racism.  The speaker was searching for meaning in a time of chaos, and the speaker is not alone – millions are doing the same.  The hope or prayer within those words was something like, “I don’t know why you let this happen to us, God, but I know you have a plan, and I’m trusting you….” 

And it’s at that point that I have to back away, because I don’t think the pandemic or the racism at the heart of the social unrest is God’s plan at all.  I’m not presuming to speak for God, but the God I know and worship does not cause a global pandemic that has inflicted illness upon millions and death upon hundreds of thousands in order to send a message.  The God I know and worship does not cause a white police officer to kill a black man by kneeling on his neck in order to get us to pay attention to centuries of racism. 

I don’t dispute the assertion that there’s a reason, or many reasons, for what we’re living in right now...I just think the reason is human behavior, not divine determination.  We’re living in a pandemic because viruses develop and circulate and are transmitted without regard to borders...and it has reached pandemic proportions because we are reluctant to take the measures that would most effectively stop the transmission. 

And in the midst of the edginess of the pandemic, the constant worry about health and the uncertainty of economic security, the egregious killing of George Floyd became a flash point for people across the country and around the world, a flash point that burns from hundreds of years of racism, discrimination, and the reality that we are light years away from acting on the belief that all are created equal…and the disturbing truth that many people don’t believe that “all are created equal” stuff anyway. 

The cracks in our social structures that have always been there are magnified with hard-to-ignore clarity in this pandemic.  People of color have been impacted by job loss, by economic hardship, by illness, and by death to a greater degree than those who are white.  And in George Floyd’s death at the knee of a white police officer, we saw, everyone in this country saw, the inequality in the justice system.  The resulting stories in the following days, still more deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, the plea to say their names, the significant protests across the country, magnified and amplified the systemic racism in country.  All of this happened not because God wanted to send a message, but because of our own very human behaviors.

What I know from chaos science is that in the midst of chaos there is always a pattern…and it’s hard to see the pattern.  In fact, sometimes it’s impossible to see the pattern, because we can’t get far enough away, in either distance or time, to see the pattern in the chaos in which we are immersed.  It may be decades before the pattern, the big picture of this time, becomes clear.  But not seeing the pattern, not seeing the whole picture, is not an excuse for stepping back and waiting for God, or someone else, to fix this mess, this time when we disregard science because it’s inconvenient, and we don’t talk about racism, because it’s uncomfortable. 

The God I know and worship has created humans with minds to understand and solve problems, with hearts to love one another, with hands to reach across the street and around the world, and with courage to do what is right.  And that’s a reason to listen, to learn, to hear the stories and perspectives, and to act.