Not Everything Happens for a Reason: Finding Peace in the Gray Areas of a Polarized World

By Rebecca Janes

Some years ago while working at a methadone clinic in New Bedford, Massachusetts, I started hearing the saying "Everything happens for a reason", and that "positive thoughts bring positive things, and negative thoughts bring negative things." When one of my clients came in saying that her taxi driver was promoting this belief, my client (who had an abusive mother) asked her,"So if a baby is sexually abused, they must've somehow sent the wrong message to the Universe?" The taxi driver(according to her understanding of the theory) said, "Yes, that the baby must've done something in a previous life to deserve the abuse."

Do I believe that positive thinking can help positive things happen? Absolutely. But there are times we need to see that bad things happen, and not always for a reason.

Sometimes we get things wrong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781543998559

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the snow doesn’t give a soft white damn who it touches e.e. cummings

Contents

Chapter 1

WHEN YOU ARE DEALT CRAPPY CARDS (OR GENES)

Chapter 2

WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON?

Life is not fair, it never has been

Chapter 3

WE LONG FOR THOSE GOOD OLD DAYS

Those were good times and comfortable beliefs (for some)

Chapter 4

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

The unraveling of those comfortable beliefs, and

the coming of the New Age

Chapter 5

WHAT IF THERE ARE NO EASY ANSWERS?

Our brain is designed to simplify complex problems—

but sometimes we get it wrong

Chapter 6

SO, IS EVERYTHING RANDOM?

Can we agree not to polarize? Remember that truth

is mostly in shades of gray

Chapter 7

WHAT MEANING CAN WE FIND IN SUFFERING, LIFE, AND DEATH

IF NO ONE IS IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT?

Meaning is rarely created for us;

it is usually up to us to create it

Chapter 8

WHAT IF I CAN FIND NO MEANING IN SUFFERING? IT’S TOO SCARY

Facing our fears

Chapter 9

FINDING HOPE

When spirit meets science

Chapter 10

FINDING PEACE

People find different answers, and that is okay—

making the best of the life we have

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chapter 1

WHEN YOU ARE DEALT CRAPPY CARDS (OR GENES)

A phone call late at night, it was my brother Ray. Kirk is dead, he said.

Kirk was my brother’s second son; he was thirty-five years old, living in San Francisco, and working as a bike courier. As I searched for words, Ray started filling in the blanks. He was on his bike and collided with a truck. He died instantly.

All I could manage was I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine what you are going through.

The next week, Ray went to California and had his son’s body cremated. A couple of weeks later, my husband, daughter, and I drove the six hours north to Maine to see Ray and his family. We gathered and remembered what a creative, free spirit Kirk had been. His girlfriend flew in from California to join us in saying goodbye.

A few weeks after the memorial service, my mother called to tell me that Ray’s oldest daughter Katrina, who had just turned thirty, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Katrina always made healthy choices, she ate organic food whenever possible, she had never smoked, and she didn’t really drink aside from some adolescent partying. She had a beautiful seven-year-old son. Katrina found the lump in her breast thirty-six hours after she heard about Kirk’s death. A biopsy was done two days before her brother’s memorial service. That was in 2008.

Katrina was tested for the BRCA gene mutation that suppresses breast cancer (Angelina Jolie has this mutation), and the tests came back negative. She had a lumpectomy and went through chemo for four months. In December, following her last month of chemo, Katrina ended up having a more extensive lumpectomy and breast reconstruction. In January 2009, she had a re-excision, and then radiation for the next two months.

There was a lovely hopeful moment in September, when after being told she would not be able to conceive again, she became pregnant. She gave birth to another baby boy.

However, four years later on December 4, 2013, two days after Kirk’s birthday, her breast cancer returned, and in January 2014 she underwent a double mastectomy. Then in February, she had to have a hysterectomy. At that point, she went for further genetic testing, and in March learned that she was positive for Li-Fraumeni syndrome (LFS).

A rare disorder, LFS increases the likelihood of young adults and even children developing different types of cancers during their lifetime. It can start in childhood, and if you survive, there is then the danger of aggressive and often terminal brain cancer. Katrina began driving from Maine to Boston frequently for screenings. Thankfully, she had good health insurance, which allowed her to get the best treatment available.

She made the brave decision to test her two sons. Both came back positive for LFS. She now takes the boys for regular scans, and each of them has already had a scare, which has meant lots of worry as well as more Boston visits and procedures to ensure that any suspicious shadows are not cancerous.

Could you look her in the eyes and tell her, Everything happens for a reason?

Chapter 2

WHAT IS WRONG WITH EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON?

Life is not fair, it never has been

America may be deeply divided in many ways, but whether people believe in God or not, our culture seems to have found common ground in the belief that everything happens for a reason.

For many who don’t believe in God, they attribute the plan to the Universe, or the Goddess, or Karma. I realize how many people rely on this belief to try and make sense of bad things that happen. I know by challenging this belief, I will offend some of those who are not ready to question it. I am writing this book to speak to those who are uncomfortable with trying to explain terrible things too easily.

Look at that belief more closely. It implies that someone or something has the power and the desire to plan every detail of every life. More importantly, the planner does this all with each individual’s personal well-being in mind. In other words, it is all for our own good. The reason this benevolent power presents us with bad experiences is apparently to make us stronger, to teach us a life lesson, or to stop us from a worse calamity, such as Maybe if I had been able to go that day, I would’ve been hit by a car and killed.

Let’s look at an example from the news: Six people were killed when a pedestrian bridge in Florida collapsed a couple of days after its construction. Then a few weeks later, a bridge collapse in Italy killed more than forty people.

Given the theory, we can assume that God or the Universe knew the exact time those bridges would fall. Do you think He/It gave the bridges a push, or just left it to shoddy workmanship? Whichever it is, He/It chose those particular people to be in Miami or Genoa, in their cars, driving at a certain speed so that they were under the bridge at the exact moment that the bridges collapsed. Oh, and that the survivors were supposed to learn some important lesson from their trauma.

I’m not denying that an all-powerful God could do that, but what kind of God would want to do it, and in that way? I don’t know anyone who would contrive to killing people in that way, so does that make them more compassionate than God? If you didn’t know any of the individuals who died that day, it may be easy to rationalize that somehow, they deserved it. But what if it was you who received that call saying that your loved one had been crushed in a bridge collapse?

How about the wildfires that killed so many in California? How were those victims chosen? Let alone the children starving in Yemen. Did God design the Yemen War to kill those kids? And did it have to be such a slow, painful death? What were those children supposed to learn from that lesson?

We quickly run up against the age-old question: How can we reconcile the belief in a benevolent force planning every aspect of every life with the suffering that exists in the world?

Does this plan apply to everyone? Maybe it only applies to certain people. That’s a little easier to accept. Some people may accept the idea that God or the Universe cares more for some particular people than others. Only Christians? Only Christians of a certain sect? Only good people? But we all know good people who died too young.

For those who believe in God—does it make sense that He is planning every aspect of each life, and if so, why does He answer some people’s prayers, but not the very sincere prayers of other believers? Why does God allow so many innocent people (including others of His faithful followers) to suffer so terribly? Why does he spare one Christian from dying in a car crash or tornado, and allow the child next door to die? Or allow hundreds of Christians in the Middle East to be massacred because of their faith? The standard answer is that It’s all in God’s plan. This seems like a pretty harsh plan from an all loving God.

And, if you do not believe in a traditional God, but instead that the Universe, Fate, Karma, or Mother Nature determines each event in your life, then what is that force and does the belief that this force has a grand plan designed for you make sense given the evidence you have seen in the world? Let’s say you receive bad news from your doctor, or you are injured in an accident, or your spouse cheats or leaves you?

Your first reaction might be: How can this be happening? It’s not fair. Or maybe your reaction would be I’m a good person, and you ask, Why is this happening to me? These reactions reveal an underlying (and common) belief that bad things are only supposed to happen to bad people, not people like us. And, from that idea, comes the more sinister belief in divine retribution. A darker side of humanity finds pleasure when something bad happens to someone who did us wrong.

When tragedy strikes a person we don’t like or someone who we think is not a good person, maybe we say something like: God don’t sleep or What goes around comes around, referring to Karma. Why are we ready to believe that this is true—that is, that some planning force dispenses tragedy as it is deserved, and how did our current culture come to so strongly endorse this belief? If we decide we cannot believe in this force anymore, then how do we cope with the fear of not having a powerful being in charge that cares about our happiness and knows what they are doing?

I think the idea that everything happens for a reason is comforting in some situations. It sometimes works in cases of small adversity. For example, I didn’t get that job I was counting on and I was devastated, but it turned out the job I got instead was where I met the love of my life. You see? Everything happens for a reason. On the other hand, couldn’t God or the Universe just let you bump into the love of your life at Starbucks or McDonalds, and allow you to get the job you really wanted?

However, for the bigger problems in life, the saying does not always help. When something tragic happens, and it will at some point, because we will see people we love die and eventually face our own death, we are likely to question and reject the idea that there is always a good reason for suffering. We can try to rationalize it.

For example:

It was a quick death? —well, at least they didn’t suffer.

It was a long debilitating and agonizing death? —I guess they had time to put their affairs in order, and their family had a chance to prepare for it. Everything happens for a reason … but it is the loved ones who are left coping with a sudden death, or the pain of grueling months watching their loved one slowly deteriorate and lose all dignity.

How many times do we hear, It shouldn’t be like this! Believing in a grand plan often leads to anger and feelings of hopelessness. Steven Pinker, in his book Enlightenment Now, writes:

A major breakthrough of the Scientific Revolution—perhaps its biggest breakthrough—was to refute the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose. He goes on to say that when someone or something can be blamed for bad things that happen (such as a person, an ethnic or religious group, witches, gods, or disembodied forces such as karma, fate, spiritual messages, cosmic justice), then bad things can be explained as everything happens for a reason, and someone can be punished, or (in the case of gods) they can be placated with offerings.

ANGER AT GOD

When things go our way, we give thanks to God or the Universe for our blessings, however, when things suddenly go terribly wrong (to ourselves or to someone we love) the inevitable (very human) reaction is: Why is this happening to me?

If we give God credit when things go the way we want, it’s natural to get angry when things go terribly wrong. Good people who want to believe that God controls everything in their lives often end up (at some point) being angry at God. And many of these good people then feel guilty for their anger at God.

To hear one of the most eloquent statements by an intelligent person who cannot bring himself to believe in God, do a search on YouTube for— Stephen Fry Annihilates God. It may be difficult to listen to, but it is the best summary of why a good (yes, moral) person cannot believe in God.

THE QUESTION OF FREEWILL

If everything happens for a reason, and there is a Grand Plan that we have no control over, why not just sit back and let things happen to us, and to others? If big corporations trash our land and species become extinct, and if we kill each other off, isn’t this in the plan? We have no control over our lives. It is all destiny.

In his classic book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, first published in 1981, Rabbi Harold Kushner presents this dilemma, stating that he sees the writer of Job in the Bible struggling in the same way. Rabbi Kushner had good reason to struggle with this idea of life being unfair. His firstborn son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder, rapid aging syndrome, and died when he was still a child. I can’t think of a more gruesome test of faith.

The way that Rabbi Kushner resolves the dilemma of bad things happening is by believing that if God controls those bad things that happen, He would be taking away our freewill. This would mean that we have no choice but to do what God wants us to do. And God would rather we obey Him because we love Him, not because we are forced to. The book is a well-thought out, intelligent explanation of how Rabbi Kushner was able to keep his faith while watching his son suffer and die. I recommend it to anyone who is struggling to hold onto their faith in God while suffering.

Job was raked through every misfortune and loss by God. God gives Satan permission to kill off Job’s ten children, but Job is still expected to only praise and worship God. No doubts, no questions. After the poor man finally proves himself to God, he is cured of his boils, has more children, and becomes wealthy again. Do you think those ten children