Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved
I heard about this book from an episode of “Fresh Air Weekend” that kept me sitting in the parking lot of a restaurant recently and made me decide that I must get hold of it immediately. So I used one of my Audible.com credits to get the audiobook, thinking that I’d love it as much as I had the interview. I was going to plunge into it and not emerge until I was finished. It was going to be great.
Well, not so much.
I managed to get through about half of the audiobook, finding myself less and less willing to get back into it. Finally, yesterday, I started it again and then thought, ‘I can’t do any more of this.’ I may or may not go back and listen to the final couple of chapters, but I’m done with the ongoing story.Is this reluctance, distaste even, because I can’t identify with the subject? Oh boy—that’s so not so. If you know anything about me, you know that several years ago our then-19-year-old son, Gideon, developed a rare form of lymphoma and went through 10 weeks of struggling to find a diagnosis and then five weeks of hospital stay and months of treatment. (In fact, Gideon’s cancer was the start of my blogging career, such as it is. If you’d like to read some of the story, here’s the link to the first post I wrote. There are others, but some of them didn’t make it over to the new website.) So I’m tremendously sympathetic about Bowler’s disease. And I’ve just discovered that she has a blog and a brand-new podcast which I’ve added to my feed. (Link is to her home page.)
The big problem with the audiobook is that Bowler reads it herself. She had read an excerpt on the radio, and I was impressed with how emotional, almost teary, she sounded as she read the section, which included a prayer she’d prayed for healing. ‘Wow, ‘ I thought. ‘she’s really willing to bare her soul as she reads.’ The problem is that the whole book is like that. After awhile it just gets to be too much, for me at least. If you think you’d like to get the story, I’d recommend the written book. Both the written and the audio versions are available at my library. I kind of wish I’d checked on that before buying the Audible version, but I’m not going to return it as I have for so many other audiobooks that I didn’t feel that I could finish, as I want her to get credit for the sale.
Okay. All that being said, I would highly recommend that you access in some way, on some platform, at least the first few chapters of the book, and perhaps the last couple. The book is worthwhile because Bowler forces herself, and her readers, to face the fact that life is often just plain unfair, at least from our limited human perspective. Bowler wrote her dissertation (now a book, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel
On the surface it sounds as if the prosperity gospel (note that I’m not capitalizing the word “gospel,” because it’s not the true Gospel) would be profoundly depressing. ‘It’s all my fault that I got cancer!’ isn’t a very pleasant thought. What this heresy (that’s what it is) does do, however, is to put power over your circumstances entirely into your own hands. If you’ll just do the right things, everything will go well for you. If you think you’ve done your best and tragedy still strikes, well, buck up, my brother! You just need to do more. There’s always the hope that you can turn things around. It’s all up to you. (And maybe also up to the “prayers” of the prosperity gospel hucksters who want you to send them money.)
Bowler isn’t just interested in PG responses to her illness, however. She’s also at war with the cliches that people use in a good-hearted attempt to say something comforting. That’s where she gets her title. (Actually, if you think about it, everything does happen for a reason. There’s no such thing as a causeless event.) Why do we say these things to someone in the midst of suffering? I believe there are several reasons. Here’s my list, which is not meant to be comprehensive:
1. We fail to imagine ourselves in the sufferer’s position; after all, doing that would make us very uncomfortable. It’s much easier to just pull out the standard line and hand it over.
2. We fail to be willing to help in a concrete, practical way. Another cliché that gets handed out like candy is “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Almost always the person in the midst of the storm doesn’t know what needs to be done. If you think of something, offer to do it. Or just go ahead and do it without asking.
3. We fail to face our own doubts and fears and end up like Job’s comforters, blaming the victim. After all, if she can be struck down at age 35 with a rare cancer, and there’s no discernible reason why that happened, then what’s to keep the same thing from happening to me? So I’d better be sure to assign blame somehow.
As I look back on our family’s brush with cancer I can’t think of a single time that any of our friends or family dragged out the cliches. We had concrete offers of help. We had people saying that they were praying. We had people who cried with us. And we had people who trekked to the hospital to visit, some of them multiple times. (Gideon sure had a reputation on the floor as being pretty popular!) No one was intrusive, no one was a know-it-all. As I look back on that whole stretch I am unspeakably grateful to them. Do I trust that God had and has a reason for all of this? Of course I do. But I don’t pretend to know what it is. And I won’t hand out that line myself to someone else.
How about you? Are there suffering people around you who could use a helping hand and an open ear?
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