Sense out of the Senseless

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INTRODUCTION

Do you find that there are times when you just have to ask ... Why? Why do they call it a TV set when you only have one? Why does your nose run and your feet smell? Why do doctors call what they do "practice?" Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii? Why is it that when you transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when you transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? Why isn’t the word "phonetic" spelled the way it sounds? Why do tugboats push their barges? And, last but not least, why do they put Braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM? Sometimes you just have to ask ... why?

A first year college student went to take his final exam in meteorology. The exam consisted of one essay question which read “Why is the sky blue?” In answer to this essay question the student wrote the following “Ah...A two point question. As to the first point ‘Why?’ This is a question that has plagued scholars, philosophers and theologians throughout the ages. Who am I, a mere freshman college student, that I should attempt to answer this eternal mystery. I must humbly submit that I do not possess the divine wisdom to answer this first point. But as to the second point, ‘Is the sky blue?’ The answer is “Yes.”

People seem to want to know why things happen as they do. Most especially “Why?” when it comes to tragedy and death. And it seems from today’s gospel reading that people haven’t changed all that much over the two thousand years since the death and resurrection of Jesus. People, then, as now, avidly discussed the latest news of death and destruction and try to understand its significance. Why was the USS Cole bombed? Why has there been so much violence in our schools. Why do good people suffer and die when the those who commit evil seem to get away with the evil they do. Why, Why, Why? This deep need to know the why of suffering has led many to formulate some bazaar answers. Like the paramedic when he was unable to revive a choking toddler said to the child’s mother, “You should be happy that you have other children.” Or that notorious statement, “God must have needed another angel in heaven.” In our need to know why we struggle to come up with a meaning for suffering that we can then live with. But just because we can live with our specific answer to why doesn’t necessarily means that those around us can live with that same answer. And there’s the rub.

We do not know precisely what tragedy some people told Jesus about on the day that our reading originally took place, all we know for sure is that several Galileans were killed in or near the temple by Pilate’s soldiers as they prepared to offer their sacrifices to God. Nor do we have a record of the tragedy involving the collapse of the tower in Siloam that killed eighteen people. All we know for sure is that then, as now, tragedy struck and people died and still other people talked about it, and tried to make sense of it. Whenever bad things happen, whenever senseless things happen, the human instinct is to try to make sense of it. It’s called the search for meaning. A man named Victor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist, developed a psychological counseling approach around this search for meaning. He called it Logo Therapy. A model for therapy developed not in the ivory halls of Cambridge, Harvard, or ... next page »