Field Of Chaos

March 1984
Lakeland
Tarpon Springs

When choosing the subject, FIELD OF CHAOS, I am not describing the Democratic primaries, not analyzing the confused failure of our Lebanon policy, not attempting to make sense of the gassy generalizations over our national deficit. My theme is illustrated in the news this week: A sniper shoots indiscriminately into a schoolyard filled with children, one dies, 11 others wounded. Another item informs that in Salt Lake City a man goes on trial for kidnapping and murdering five boys. A blizzard strikes the Great Plains and sweeps east, at least 50 people die because of the storm. Why did not God, or whatever you name the power of the Universe, arrange the sequence of cause and effect differently? The blameless are struck down again and again by implausible junctions of circumstances and are the victims of unmerited suffering.

The procession of unexplainable tragedies is enough to strain the faith of anyone who might believe that there is meaning and purpose in this complex universe. We can organize, design, and engineer space travels that reach the moon; we can devise vehicles that propel a man alone in space. But we do not come close to handling the immediate and painfully obvious needs for peace, jobs, and feeding the hungry in the world. Many more billions are spent promoting detergents, beer, and automobiles than on research for peace or resolution of conflict.

Matthew Arnold, culturally a Victorian, but not complacent or romantic, may have been one of the first to sense the modern mood of despair which increasingly characterizes our time: (last two stanzas of Dover Beach). He grieves for the times:

“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 the 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 astonishing [new forms of] communications technology [are] the instrument[s] whereby we have become aware, as our grandparents never were, of tragic struggle in remote parts of the earth. The film, magnetic tape, remote camera, and the satellite provide instantaneous or slightly delayed impressions of an airplane crash, a hungry child, and the savagery of wars, declared and undeclared. “This is a crazy world,” we hear and say, more and more.

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 to stop the assassin’s trigger finger, the murderer’s bludgeon, or ease to storm when blizzards across the Midwest snuff out innocent lives.

How do we deal with chaotic happenings and unexplainably tragic events that not only stain the front pages and light up the tube, but also come home to us individually or those dear to us?

A Danish anthropologist, studying the lives and customs of the Vendas, a tribe in Rhodesia, wrote (New Yorker, 2/19/66), “One group we stayed with did a particularly subtle thing to propitiate the goddess of Chaos.” They planted 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 life we cannot explain when we consider all the 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 acknowledgment which helps acceptance.

Another East African tribe “explains the presence of evil in the world by a hypothesis which seems reasonable to them. Although God is good, he has, most unfortunately, a half-witted brother who is forever interfering with what he does (NY Times Book Review; date?). From the time persons began to think conceptually, to have ideas even in the fumbling beginnings of human thought, there has always been worry and consternation about the meaning of life and the cause of unmerited suffering, of tragedy, for which the victim seems blameless. The Garden of [Eden] myth was an attempt to explain death and pain. In the vivid Greek mythology, Pandora opened the box which loosened 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, “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 could not be turned, who carried the ‘abhorrent shears’ and cut the thread at death.” (MYTHOLOGY, p. 43) [CJW note: One constant effort seems to be that enigma [that] God was/is domesticated and interpreted for a particular cultural preference]

But most would agree that the Hebrew scripture of Job is the most searching literary creation presenting the agonizing problem of unmerited suffering.

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

That rhyme is not from Job, but from J.B., Archibald MacLeish’s modern play which Job inspired. With the poet’s economy of words, he proposed the ancient riddle which disturbs our wonderings. Why? There is some explanation for sufferings which follow a mistake or an act of wrong-doing. If I should be driving while stoned or 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 if others are killed or maimed, what then? When the sudden and undeserved blow of fate deprives us of a person or a needed ability, and no one seems in any way responsible, in our anguish we cry, “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 classic, Job, has deeper roots than pre-Christian Palestine. Told as a folk story and legend centuries before taking written form, there are variants of the tale in the ancient traditions of India, Egypt, and Babylon.

The merit of Job is more than its place as the literary masterpiece of the Bible, although it is that. Job gets you in the gut because ultimate problems are dealt with.

The scene of the 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. Important to the understanding of this theme, 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 humans 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. He has fine sons and daughters. How can Job really be judged? Since everything is pleasant, secure, and gratifying, he is not likely to question God’s ways.

The prologues sets up the Divine 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 drama 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 a painful skin disease and is rejected by his community. He moves to the rubbish heap on the outskirts of the city.

He is visited by friends, Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, who remind Job of the belief which is characteristic of much of the Old Testament: No innocent man is visited by calamity. The disasters which struck Job must have been 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.

But Job strongly insists 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. [CJW note: The poetry and images of these defense counsels for God are superb.]

In masterful, poetic sequence, the problems become defined. Can the undeniable existence of undeserved suffering, of “fields of Chaos,” be coherent with the belief in an all-powerful God whose nature is love? 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 ... want to hold to belief, take refuge in the undemonstrated assertion that the Creator is transcendent and mysterious. Therefore, any human answer must be inadequate. When one reads the 38th chapter and following, one senses the feeling that the human species is such an infinitesimal part of a mammoth creation that it is altogether presumptuous 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 unconvincing.

How profound are our myths of good and evil? On one level of discourse, we speak with resignation: “that’s the way the ball bounces; the umpire made a bad call, but it’s not going to be changed.”

We live in a world where the physics of relativity is accepted. We live in a world where scientific studies propose that even atoms, in their 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 which provide a solid base for assured living are not easy to come by.

There are those who find security in the faith that although tragedies are real and that suffering frequently overwhelms explanations, the universe is basically good. “God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform,” underlies the convictions of many persons, enabling them to build useful lives and find adequate meaning in human experience.

Many of us, however, 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, there is 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.

Consider, rather, certain points made by Hugh Thomson Kerr of Princeton (editorial THEOLOGY TODAY) Jn. 66 p. 469) representing a segment of theological thought in our age. He wrote, “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 has kept strictly apart. Secondly, he wrote, the mood of our modern age is that “the meaning of existence is ambiguous.” We have the theatre of the absurd, the music of disharmonies rather than harmony and theme, literature which is disorganized in structure and whose structure and essence, if there is an essence, must be painfully extracted from heaped-up incongruities. Kerr raised 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 seems helpful for our modern mood and fields of chaos, is “fragments of truth can be more significant than 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 cosmic level to another, but because modern people think that any particular link may be as important as the chain itself.”

One particular link which seems to me central to an understanding of the field of chaos in human experience is that the universe is not necessarily organized for the good of the human species, although many people take comfort in that unverified notion. 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 other life. Schweitzer called this “the terrible mystery of life.” The human species is one of countless organisms struggling to exist, to provide for, and to continue its own species. No apology is needed for this struggle. But the uncountable plurality of organic life needs to be recognized rather than any blithe, unfounded assumption that the only important life is human life.

One can have faith in the Universe as containing purpose and meaning for humankind as a unique creation, or accept the Universe as a creation containing meaning for all that is, nonhuman as well as human [CJW note: even though it is meaning that cannot be fathomed]. One can also defy the Universe as alien to human purposes, inconsistent with human purposes as these have evolved in unique human consciousness. But whatever one chooses as the focus 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 disclosed to be infinitely vaster than supposed. As our microscopes are built to have greater powers of magnification, so the microscopic universe recedes into ever 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 ambiguity and partial truths, even though these seem frequently confounded by mystery. The tragic cannot be neatly explained by thesis, scripture, 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, psychoanalysis, or Marxism. They find dignity and meaning enough in human love. Sarah says,

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

We can love – and we are worth loving. That is a truth-link that needs no heavenly God-Satan bet. Perhaps that is what May Sarton was getting at in her invocation to Kali, the goddess of destruction:

“Help us be the always hopeful
Gardeners of the spirit
Who know that without darkness
Nothing comes to birth.”

St. Augustine once wrote, “People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the vast compass or the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

The greatest wonder is the self. The “I” that reaches out to a “Thou.” Each of us best answers for himself/herself when the anxieties caused by the field of chaos intrude, batter, injure, betray, that which we call the self. But in ancient and modern dramatizations, in the ceremonies of the cultures, whether simple or complex, there can be the authentic hope that men/women at their best demonstrate 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 the ancients, the ceremonies of pre-industrial tribes and the authentic stance for the arts, the sciences, the religions of this difficult modern age.