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One
of the great things about religious belief is its ability, sometimes, to help
people deal with tragedy. When life is
miserable or even horrible, some people can maintain their belief that God will
protect them, that God will make it turn out all right in the end, or that God
has some greater purpose that justifies their suffering. When life ends, people of faith can believe
that their loved ones have gone over to a better place.
So
if you never believed in this sort of thing, or you find yourself no longer
believing, how do you make it through the tough times?
There
is no easy answer to that – including religion. Although religious belief sustains some people even through the
worst misery, it doesn’t work that way for most folks. When they are miserable, they are miserable;
when they are in pain, they hurt like hell.
Religion doesn’t take that away.
In fact, in the worst of times, many people turn against their old
beliefs, because they realize that God’s “providence” was just wishful
thinking.
And
it was wishful thinking. There
is no evidence that believers have fewer problems here on earth than
non-believers. In fact, it is one of
the classic laments of the faithful that bad things happen to good people,
while the wicked prosper. The idea that
God provides for us here on earth, furthermore, is not just blind faith, but it
is dumb faith as well, at least when it leads people not to take matters into
their own hands. Watching a ton of
bricks fall on you while assuming that God or some guardian angel is going to
protect you does not work nearly as well as hot-footing it out of there. Faith does not actually move mountains – or
the stock market, or the germs in your body, or anything else.
Nor
does it appear that there is any reason – again, other than wishful thinking –
to believe that things are different in some afterlife: that the good people
are whooping it up in paradise, while the evil ones suffer or are simply
eliminated.
Do
you really want to try to believe in those things just because they might make
you feel good someday, when life is going against you? Maybe, but consider this:
The
best weapon in almost any tough situation is the Truth. Of course, we cannot ever rightly claim to
possess Truth, but at least we can avoid believing things for bad reasons. When life is running against us, do we
really want to kid ourselves into believing that it is OK? Isn’t it better to accept whatever pain or
evil we are dealing with as a simple reality, so that we can face it head-on,
and thereby defeat it, or at least outlast it?
Trying
to reconcile the world’s horrors with the goodness of God is pretty much a
waste of time. In the end, the best you
can do is say that God’s ways are mysterious to us, because he is wiser than we
are. That’s one way to accept what is
happening. Another way, one that works
at least as well, is to accept that there actually is no meaning to the evil
that befalls us. It’s just evil, or
sometimes just the way the world is, or most often just bad luck (the “luck of
the Polish,” as we call it in my family).
And you can accept it or you can fight it.
You
can accept it as “fate” if you wish – provided you take that term loosely (your
future is not, in fact, pre-determined somewhere, but at the same time, rotten
stuff happens that you have little or no control over). This is different from accepting it as “the
will of God,” because even when you say those words, it’s hard not to feel that
God is betraying you. So in addition to
your actual problems, you have a new problem, which is trying to reconcile your
horrible circumstances with your supposedly loving God.
You
can also accept bad things as fundamentally meaningless. This is where the absence of cosmic meaning
could pay off for you psychologically.
You are generally not suffering because you are more evil than other
people – your suffering is random. It’s
not about you. You don’t need to feel
guilty or ashamed. You rolled the dice,
as we all do every day, and you crapped out.
It’s just bad luck. (All right,
sometimes you made mistakes along the way and so you helped bring problems on
yourself, but that’s true whether you are religious or not, so we’re not
dealing with that situation here.)
The
Buddhists have a technique to help people who are suffering rise above it
(almost literally so). The idea is to
look at yourself from the outside instead of the inside. “Oh, poor Hedwig (or whatever your name is),
look at how she is hurting – doesn’t she know it will be all right soon?” That is, look at yourself suffering as you
would look at someone else suffering: with sympathy and affection, but with
also with an outside point of view that puts it in perspective.
As a
psychological trick, this can work for religious and non-religious people
alike. But the non-religious have an
advantage here: they already understand that life in its most cosmic sense is
meaningless, and that its only meaning comes from the meaning we give it. So we always have the option of stepping
back to that objective level and saying:
Well, yes, I did lose
my job and my home and my family and my health, and I really had put my heart
into all of those things. But now they
are gone, and I can afford, emotionally, to step back and realize that their
meaning to me was the meaning I put into them – and so my suffering at their
loss is only the loss of something that I chose to hold close. Now I can choose not to hold them so close,
and I can look for other things to give my life meaning.
Of
course, you still go through a grieving process, and this attitude, if it works
for you at all (it doesn’t work all the time, or for everybody), can only work
once you have done that. But in the
end, it does help you to let go, and then to embrace something or someone new. This is not to say that everything can be
forgotten or replaced: if you lose the one you love most, it can take a long,
long time to get over that, if you ever do.
But it actually does help when you understand that your loss, however
important to you, is not of cosmic significance. The universe has not betrayed you, and God has not betrayed
you. You have simply gotten a bad break
– and being able to see it that way helps you to move beyond it and to go find
a better break.
So
much for acceptance. You can also fight
back, if you want. Religious people
tend to be a tad careful about defying God.
In the Bible, some of Job’s friends advised him, when his undeserved
punishments were at their worst, to just curse God and move on. Job would not do that – which is the smart
play, if you believe in God. But if you
don’t, you can defy your fate, and
you can say, in effect: “OK, world, beat me down if you like, but when I get
knocked down, I get up again, and you’re never gonna keep me down.”[1]
For
all of that, however, it would be unfair to sell religion short as a way of
coping with life’s evils. You don’t
have to hang around evangelicals (or even ordinary religious folk) very long
before you hear the story of someone who was completely down and out – perhaps
a drug addict, perhaps a criminal, perhaps even a politician – and who found
the Lord and was saved from the life he or she was living.
It’s
easy to scoff at that sort of thing, but we really should avoid being smug in
that way. Such things happen all the
time, whether we non-believers like to credit them or not. You thought I was wise-cracking about
politicians a moment ago, but one of the more public conversions occurred in
the 1970s when Chuck Colson – one of the bad guys from the Watergate affair –
suddenly found religion and even while in prison began preaching a new
tune. There was a whole lot of
sniggering cynicism about that move, but more than thirty years later he is
still a born-again Christian with an active ministry in prison reform, when he
has no real motivation to fake it. The
skeptics were wrong. Religion does
change people’s lives sometimes.
And
here again, we can say that if you fall into that category, there is no real
need to turn your back on it. Likewise,
if you are not in that category, but know people who are, it is unkind and
unwarranted for you to deny the reality of what they have experienced, to make
fun of it, or to try to talk them out of it.
As we said before, the only thing that legitimately gives meaning to
your life is what is meaningful to you. If you or someone you know feels that
religion has saved him or her, then that’s good enough.
But
the rest of us need not join them.
Religion is not the only thing that saves people who have made a mess of
their lives. Love can do it, too. So, depending on circumstances, can
psychotherapy, social work, education, hitting bottom, the military, support
groups, literature, labor, or any other human thought or activity or social
setting that can inject a new sense of meaning or purpose. A person on the edge could be saved by
playing Parcheesi, if s/he took enough of an interest in it. Religion definitely has some advantages over
Parcheesi, when it comes to pulling people back from the brink, but so do a lot
of other alternatives.
There
is one other subject we should briefly consider here: prayer. If you have ever been religious, you know
how comforting and powerful prayer can be.
There are many kinds of prayer, and prayer when life is going bad –
either for yourself or for someone you care about – can be a way of letting go
emotionally, and a way of “doing something.”
When you can’t solve a problem yourself, you can put it in God’s
hands. When people are in trouble and
you can’t help, you can comfort yourself and them by saying you are praying for
them.
The
benefits of prayer, though, can be achieved in other ways, though perhaps not
with so little effort. It’s a great
idea that you can spend fifteen seconds in silent contemplation and thereby
harness the greatest conceivable power to the solution of your problems. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have much
effect, other than making us feel better.[2] Feeling better is good, but for oneself it
can be achieved through contemplation, meditation, or thoughtful
discussion. For others, it is better
achieved by helping in a tangible way rather than by prayer. And if you can’t help in a tangible way,
then “you will be in my thoughts” is just as good as “you will be in my
prayers.”
In
general, you will find that there are secular versions of most religious
practices and attitudes. There is
prayer, and there is meditation. There
are religious epiphanies, and there are non-religious ones. There is devotion to one’s God or church,
and there is devotion to one’s country or school or community.
We
needn’t suppose, therefore, that religious attitudes and behaviors don’t work –
some of them certainly do, and some of them possibly do. But you can achieve the same benefits in a
non-religious flavor. And if you are
not, or are no longer, a religious believer, the non-religious version will
actually be more effective for you than the religious one, because it doesn’t
require you to carry so much extra baggage.
In
the end, of course, all of life’s problems cannot be solved here in these pages. It’s not even practical to suggest general
strategies for them – lots of other books do that. All I can say is that when you are drowning, there are many
things floating out there that you can hold onto – and only one of them is a
cross.
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© 2006 by
C.S. Yanikoski, Harvard, Massachusetts
[1] Known in
academic circles as the Chumbawamba Declaration.
[2] In recent years
there have been a number of scientific studies on the efficacy of prayer. Some positive results have been reported, though
skeptics have complained of procedural, statistical, or other faults in the
studies. So there is no definitive
evidence either way. But even if some
of the results are valid and the effects are real, the impact appears to be
small, and its mechanism is unknown.
The whole endeavor is reminiscent of the early studies of extra-sensory
perception, which initially showed strongly positive results but were found to
be flawed and ultimately invalid.