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Letters Of The Observer

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Kamal Korkees

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“Chance’ simply means historical contingency - this happens rather than that. It is not automatically to be given the tendentious adjective “blind”, as if it were an unambiguous sign of meaninglessness. Rather, it may be seen as signifying the shuffling exploration and realization of fertile possibilities, by which creation makes itself. This due independence of process is a good gift, but it has a necessary cost attached to it. Raggednesses and blind alleys, as well as fruitful outcomes, are inescapable accompaniments of this evolving self-realization. Biology even helps theology a little with the deep question of theodicy, the problem of the evil and suffering of the world. Exactly the same biochemical processes that enable some cells to mutate and produce new forms of life - in other words, the very engine that has driven the stupendous four billion year history of life on Earth - these same processes will inevitably allow other cells to mutate and become malignant. In a non-magic world, it could not be different, and the world is not magic because its Creator is not a capricious Magician. I do not pretend for a moment that this insight removes all the perplexities posed by the sufferings of creation. Yet it affords some mild help, in that it suggests that the existence of cancer is not gratuitous, as if it were due to the Creator’s callousness or incompetence. We all tend to think that if we had been in charge of creation we would have made a better job of it. We would have kept the nice things (flowers and sunsets) and got rid of the nasty (disease and disaster). The more science helps us to understand the process of the universe, the more, it seems to me, to cohere into a single ‘package deal’. The light and the dark are two sides of the same coin. John Polkinghorne, “Understanding the Universe”, Cosmic Questions, James. B Miller, ed.”

SufferingChanceEvolutionTheodicy
Author:John Polkinghorne F.R.S. K.B.E.
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“I don't want it to have happened. I want it to not have happened, but if you are grateful for your life, which I think is a positive thing to do, not everybody is--and I am not always--but it's the most positive thing to do, then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for. So, what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people's loss, which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply and to understand what it's like to be a human being, if it's true that all humans suffer.”

LoveLifeSufferingLossGratitudeConnection
Author:Stephen Colbert
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“What we need is a profound rethinking of the nature of suffering itself, and what it is trying to highlight and ask us to change. We need to repoliticise emotional discontent in the minds of teachers, parents and policy-makers, rather than continue reducing it to dysfunctions that allegedly reside within the self. We need to acknowledge that suffering also reflects family/socio/political dynamics we would do well to better acknowledge and address.”

SufferingMental HealthTherapyHealthcarePsychotherapyNeoliberalismDepoliticisation
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
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“I wonder,' said Gertrude dreamily, 'if some great blessing, great enough for th eprice, will be the meed of all our pain? Is the agony in which the world is shuddering the birth-pang of some wondrous new era? Or is it merely a futile struggle of ants In the gleam of a million million of suns? We think very lightly, Mr. Meredith, or a calamity which destroys an ant-hill and half its inhabitants. Does the Power that runs the universe think us of more importance than we think ants?' 'You forget,' said Mr. Meredith, with a flash of his dark eyes, 'that an infinite Power must be infinitely little as well as infinitely great. We are neither, therefore there are things too little as well as too great for us to apprehend. To the infinitely little an ant is of as much importance as a mastodon.”

GodSufferingMeaningInfinityL M MontgomeryRilla Of InglesideGertrude OliverJohn Meredith
Book:Rilla of Ingleside: A Tale of Youth and War in the Glen
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