Field of Chaos

March 13, 1966
Plainfield

Field of Chaos

A jet aircraft twists apart in the grip of high winds near Mt. Fuji and more than one hundred persons die quickly and tragically. No human malevolence seemed involved. The co-incidence of the destructive wind and the happening of the plane’s location is beyond easy explanation. A little girl, Wendy Wolin, innocently walked the street near her home, Wednesday, and is fatally stabbed by an attacker who still eludes the search by police. Why did not God or the Universe plan the sequence of cause and effect so that Wendy would have been at home when the killer walked the street? The blameless are struck down again and again by implausible junctions of circumstances or are the victims of unmerited suffering.

The quantity of unexplainable tragedies is enough to strain the faith of anyone who might believe there is meaning and purpose in this complex world. We can organize, design and execute space shots that hit the moon; and we can devise space vehicles that permit men to walk in space, but we do not seem to come close to handling the immediate and painfully obvious problems of the need for peace, jobs, decent housing and equal opportunity for the poor. Many more billions are spent promoting detergent, beer and automobiles than on research for peace. Not only is there a theatre of the absurd, but also the arts seem modeled on the real but fantastic happenings that seemingly refute any notion that thee is a God who has an orderly plan for life and a noble destiny for man.

Matthew Arnold, culturally a Victorian, may have been one of the first to sense the modern mood of desperation which increasingly seems to characterize the expressions of 20th century man. In mournful words the poet wrote (and these are the last two stanzas of DOVER BEACH):

“The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world which seems
To live before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

The amazing progress in communications has been the instrument whereby we have become aware, as our grandparents never were, of tragic struggle in remote parts of the world. The moving film, the magnetic tape and the remote camera provide instantaneous or slightly delayed impressions of an airplane crash, a hungry child and the savagery of wars, undeclared as well as official. “This is a crazy world” is heard more and more frequently.

The late Albert Camus, Nobel winner in literature, wrote in “Create Dangerously,” (RESISTANCE, REBELLION, AND DEATH, p. 26), “The suffering of mankind is such a vast subject that it seems no one could touch it unless he was like Keats, so sensitive it is said, that he could have touched pain itself with his hands.”

It seems plain to me that God, if there is a God, does not intervene when slippery streets cause fatal collisions or when blizzards on the Great Plains snuff out innocent human lives.

How do we deal with chaotic happenings and unexplainably tragic events that not only stain the front pages and light up the tube with woeful headlines but also sometimes come right home to us or those close to us?

A Danish anthropologist, studying the lives and customs of the Vendas, a tribe in Rhodesia, wrote (see “New Yorker,” 2/19/66, article by Mary Cable), “One group we stayed with did a particularly subtle thing to propitiate the goddess of Chaos;” they planted each year a Chaos Field – all sorts of seeds were mixed up and thrown together in one field. All variety of confused growths came up in that plot. This ceremony by a pre-industrial culture deep in Africa may seem primitive rather than subtle. But chaos is a part of human life we cannot explain when we consider all the bizarre coincidences which lead to tragedy and suffering. Why not recognize this instead of trying to pretend it isn’t there? Chaos is part of our lives; perhaps that African recognition by way of the ritual of random growth is a basic expression which helps acceptance.

Another East African tribe “explains the presence of evil in the world by the reasonable hypothesis that, although God is good, he has, most unfortunately, a half-witted brother who is forever interfering with what he does.” (NY Times Book Review section, date?)

Since persons began to think conceptually, even in the fumbling beginnings of human thought, there has been worry about the meaning of life and the cause of unmerited suffering and of tragedy for which the victims seem blameless. The Garden of [Eden] myth was an attempt to explain death and pain. In the vivid mythology of the ancient Greeks, Pandora opened the box which loosed innumerable troubles into the world. Another variety of Greek myth which tried to explain the unexplainable was the myth of the fates. Edith Hamilton wrote (p. 43, MYTHOLOGY), “very important but assigned no abode whether in heaven or on earth were the fates, Moirae, who Hesiod says, give to men at birth evil and good to have. They were three, Clotho the Spinner who spun the thread of life; Lachesis the Disposer of Lots, who assigned to each man his destiny; Atropos, she who would not be turned, who carried the ‘abhorred shears’ and cut the thread of death.”

But beyond much argument, the Hebrew scripture of Job is the greatest literary creation presenting the agonizing problem of unmerited suffering. A few weeks ago in a sermon on the Hebrew prophets, Ivan Lissner the historian was quoted (THE LIVING PAST, p. 19-20): “If I were asked which I considered the most important landmarks in the history of mankind, I should probably reply, the invention of writing by the Sumerians, the book of Job, and the Prophets’ wealth of ideas, democracy in Athens during the Periclean Age; the life and death of Socrates; the art of Japanese wood engraving and the poems of Li Tai Po.”

The book of Job:

“If God is God He is not good,
If God is Good, He is not God;
Take the even, take the odd...”

Because this society presented “J.B.” as a dramatic worship service, a year or so ago, perhaps some of you will recognize these lines by Archibald MacLeish. With the poet’s skilled economy of words, he proposes the ancient riddle which shakes our wonderings. Why? There is some explanation at least, for sufferings which follow a mistake or act of wrong-doing. If I should be driving while drunk, and my car, out of control, smashes into a bridge, my injuries and suffering would be at least partly explained. The responsibility is mine, “I had it coming,” as we say. but when the mysterious and undeserved blow of fate deprives us of a person or a needed ability, and no one seems in any way responsible, our anguished hearts cry in protest, “why did this happen?” “What did we do to deserve this cruel, unmerited suffering?”

The old poetic drama of JOB wrestles with the problem of the presence of sudden evil or unexpected bad luck. If God is good, he cannot be all powerful. If God is all powerful, he cannot be all good. Must we “take the even or take the odd?”

The Biblical drama has deeper roots than in pre-Christian Palestine. Told as a folk story and legend centuries before taking written form, there are variants of the plot in the ancient traditions of India, Egypt, and Babylon. The cast of characters in the book of JOB may have originally been Edomites, a semi-nomadic people, with a strong feeling for freedom, whose homeland was southeast of the Dead Sea.

The dramatic style and poetic comprehension of JOB is unsurpassed. Without doubt it is the literary masterpiece of the Bible. The author (some scholars say “authors”) commands the most extensive vocabulary of any Biblical book; his knowledge is encyclopedic and he measures up to the most demanding dimension of great artistry – he deals with ultimate problems.

The scene of prologue of JOB is the Court of Heaven. The Lord reigns in all magnificence as the sons of God appear with Him. Among the sons of God is The Satan. It is important to an understanding of the theme, that in this instance, The Satan is neither the “Devil” nor an incarnation of evil. The Satan – some scholars believe a more accurate translation is “The Adversary” - is an inspector or auditor of men and their affairs.

God indicates to The Adversary that Job is the perfect servant. The Adversary answers, “Why not?” Job is prosperous, his family life is happy and he has fine sons and daughters. How can Job really be judged? Since everything is so pleasant, secure and gratifying, he is not likely to question God’s ways.

The prologue sets up the supernatural machinery by which Job’s faith will be tested. God gives The Adversary permission to bring all manner of suffering upon Job for the purpose of testing his faithfulness. The dramatic story presents in superb imagery the mystery of the good man experiencing suffering which is both catastrophic and undeserved.

In rapid sequence, the poetic sections describe the disasters which strike Job. His herds are stolen, his children die tragically, his wife bids him “curse God and die,” he is afflicted with painful skin disease and he is rejected by the community. He moves to the rubbish pile on the outskirts of the village.

He is visited by friends, Eliphaz, Zophar and Bildad who remind Job of the theological belief which is characteristic of much of the Old Testament: No innocent man was visited by calamity. The disasters which struck Job must have been the consequences of the sins of Job. Through several cycles of speeches, these friends of Job argue this theological point of view. The good are rewarded, the evil are punished. Therefore Job must have committed evil.

Job strongly insists that he did no wrong. He was not tormented by guilt. While he did not question the power of God, Job denied that human good is justly rewarded or human evil deservedly punished on earth.

In masterful, poetic sequence, the problems become defined. Can the undeniable existence of undeserved suffering, of “fields of chaos,” be harmonious with belief in an all-powerful God whose nature is love? In the scripture, the author of Job seems to affirm that the only reasonable answer is that God is almighty, but cannot be completely just. However, knowledge and understanding are limited by our capacity and brief time on earth. Most believers who want to hold to belief take refuge in the undemonstrated assertion that the Creator is transcendent and mysterious. Therefore any answer offered by man must be inadequate. When one reads the 38th chapter, one senses the feeling that man is such an infinitesimal part of a mammoth creation that it is altogether presumptuous of man to question God’s power and wisdom.

Biblical Job remained unconvinced that he had been evil, but accepted the reality that there would be no explanation. One scholar appraised the whole of Job as a “derision of theology,” in that theology labors mightily to explain the unexplainable, and is completely unconvincing.

The perennial rebirth of the problem of blameless tragedy and unmerited suffering indicates that no answer in any culture is fully adequate or persistingly satisfactory. Is this ancient dilemma a continuing problem for modern man? Yes. The late Clarence Skinner, dean of Tufts School of Religion and inspirational teacher of many Unitarian Universalist ministers, answered affirmatively when he wrote (HUMAN NATURE AND THE NATURE OF EVIL, p. 16-17): “Why become so concerned over an issue that is as ancient as history? It is not true that ever since man emerged from the lower stages of animal life, he has focused attention upon the question of evil? The good have always been with man, but he has accepted it more or less as a matter of course. There has been comparatively little discussion of the problem of good, since it is assumed to be a normal condition; but there has been endless debate and complaint about the problem of evil because man has always felt it to be a denial of the normal. Is there, therefore, any reason why this problem of evil is any more critical than it has ever been?

“In one sense it is as old as man, but every generation must rethink its fundamental questions in the light of its own cultural achievements. The old answers do not always satisfy original minds. It may be that we cannot make as good a solution to this perplexity as did Plato or Aristotle; but for some reason, perhaps not altogether strange, we want to do our own thinking.

“In another sense, there is a crisis which compels us to examine this philosophy of evil anew, and to make some decision regarding it. For one thing, evil has more power to destroy than ever before and that also must give us pause. We cannot escape that issue. If we try to dodge it intellectually it will soon be blasting our houses to splinters. Another reason is because we stand on the threshold of a creative era in man’s development, great with doom or promise. It matters immensely how we answer this challenge.”

How profound are our myths of good an evil? On one level of discourse we speak with resignation, “that’s the way the ball bounces; that’s the way the cookie crumbles; that’s the way the fender bends.”

Today we live in a world where Einstein’s physics of relativity [is] accepted. We live in a world where a scientific hypotheses propose that even atoms in basic structures exhibit random behavior. We live in a world where genetic theory proposes that human genes mutate mysteriously. Most of all we live in a world where convictions that provide a solid base for assured living are not easy to come by.

There are still those who find security in the faith that although tragedies are real and suffering frequently overwhelms explanations, the Universe is basically good. “God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform,” embodies the underlying convictions of many persons, enabling them to build useful lives and find adequate meaning in human experience. [editor’s note – the rest of this paragraph is lightly crossed out in pencil] Harold DeWolf, a Methodist and teacher of philosophy expressed this view well, “On the view being defended here, every natural evil must be regarded as having a positive place in the purpose of God. It is therefore, not to be treated as something in spite of which we do the best we can. On the contrary, we are to treat it, as the prophets dealt with it, as something by means of which God’s will is being done and hence great new good coming to pass, good worth more than all the cost.” (A THEOLOGY OF THE LIVING CHURCH, p. 142).

However, many of us cannot accept such assumptions that everything works for good because there seems no doubt to some of us that there is much in human experience that is bad, considerable evil we could do without, such tragedy that might have been averted. I for one remain skeptical of bromides, Pollyanna slogans and easy assurances that everything works for good, if we only knew it.

I would rather set before you certain points made by Hugh Thomson Kerr of Princeton University, in an editorial in THEOLOGY TODAY (Jan. 66, p. 469-70), which represent a significant segment of much theological thought in our age today. As he writes, “we are moving theologically into an era of the open option.” That is, there is increasing recognition that no religious group can claim that its interpretation of truth represents the only valid claim. This attitude is reflected in the increasing cooperation and conversation between groups which only a few years ago had kept strictly apart. Second, the mood of our modern age is that the “meaning of existence is ambiguous.” As mentioned earlier, in our age we have the theatre of the absurd, the music of disharmonies and chaos rather than harmony and theme, literature which is disorganized in structure and whose essence, if there is an essence, must be painfully extracted from heaped-up incongruities. Kerr raises the question, “Will some preacher someday dare to preach the gospel as it illustrates, rather than solves, the sheer ambiguity of life?”

The third observation he makes, which to me seems helpful for our modern mood and fields of chaos is “fragments of truth can be more significant than the truth as a whole. There is an experimental quality to contemporary attitudes about life and the world. Authentic experience, no matter how fragmentary or dislocated, is more than wisdom about the causal connections within the vast complex of reality. This is a protest against all traditional harmonies and chains-of-being not because they aren’t fascinating in their escalation from one level to another, but because post-modern man thinks that any particular link may be as important as the chain itself.”

One particular link which seems to be central to an understanding of the field of chaos in human experience is that the universe is not necessarily organized for the good of man. We poison ants, kill deer, spray mosquitoes, freeze fish and slaughter beef and lamb. We live on other forms of life, even as all life lives on all life. Schweitzer called this “the terrible mystery of life.” Man is one of countless organism struggling to exist, to provide and continue his own species. No apology is needed for this struggle. But the plurality of organic life needs to be recognized rather than blithely accepting the unfounded assumption that the only significant life is human life. Joseph Wood Krutch, retired Columbia professor, who has written so sensitively of natural life, commented, “When man moves in, nearly everything else suffers from his intrusion sometimes because he wants the space they occupy and the food they eat, but often simply because when he sees a creature not of his kind, or a man not of his race, his first impulse is to ‘kill it.’” The whole cycles of life, death, rebirth, suspended animation, germination and growth are not man’s unique qualities, but traits of organic life. When one accepts the naturalness of all of life’s rhythms, including the human, then the unexplainable events in the life of the species called man may be seen in a perspective of much greater depth. Not that such perspective makes tragedy less piercing or suffering more acceptable, but simply that life has a scope and a dimension not limited by the definitions of human life and assumptions defined by human culture.

One can trust the Universe as containing purpose and meaning for man as a unique creature; or accept the Universe as a creation containing meaning and purpose for all that is, non-human as well as human. One can also defy the Universe as alien to human purposes, as inconsistent with human purpose as this purpose has evolved in the unique human consciousness. But whatever one chooses as the locus of meaning, always there will be a field planted to chaos. We will never fully understand. As our telescopes become more powerful the depths of space are revealed to be must vaster than supposed. As our microscopes are built to have greater powers of magnification, so the microscopic universe recedes into progressively more minute forms. Always the grasp of knowledge seems loosened by the elusiveness of mystery.

Like the Venda tribe in Rhodesia attuned to the mysteries of the field of chaos, we can accept mystery, ambiguity and the partial truths, even though these seem frequently confounded by mystery. The tragic will never be neatly explained by thesis, experiment or creed.

In one of the endings MacLeish wrote for “J.B.,” Sarah and J.B. find their consolation in none of the accepted ways of salvation – orthodox religion, analysis, or Marxism. Persons find meaning and dignity in human love.

Sara says,

“Blow on the coal of my heart.
The candles in churches our out.
The lights have gone out in the sky.
Blow on the coal of the heart
And we’ll see by and by....”

Writing in praise of the late Pope John XXIII, Norman Cousins (SR 1/19/63) commented, “As for any suffering caused by his illness, Pope John remarked that a lifetime of rich memories is a potent enemy of pain. He said he had so many satisfactions to dwell upon that it was difficult to think of personal distress.”

Edith Hamilton, writing about results of her studies of Hesiod, earliest scribe of Greek mythologies, quoted Milton,

“First there was chaos, the vast immeasurable abyss
Outrageous as a sea of dark, wasteful, wild.”

Then she wrote to the effect that before the gods appeared there was only formless chaos, unbroken darkness, brooding, brooding. Then without explanation, children were born from Night and Erebus, the unfathomable depth where death dwells. Love was born and with it birth and growth; beauty banished confusion; Love created Night and Day.

Each of us answers for himself when the anxieties caused by the field of chaos intrude upon selfhood. But in the ancient and modern dramatizations, in the ceremonies of the cultures, whether simple or complex, there may be a stirring in our minds and a transformation of our emotions as man at his best demonstrates that disaster can be accepted, that human dignity can re-assert the goodness of life, even in the midst of mysterious evil and unsearchable suffering. This is the message of the mythologies of ancient man, the ceremonies of pre-industrial man and an authentic goal for the art and science of modern man.