Seeking to Know Why As a hospital chaplain, I see a lot of suffering. Illness, financial insecurity, disability, betrayal, loneliness, and loss are common. Some patients wonder why God has afflicted them so. Even those who understand that we can’t divine a reason for suffering will still search for one. It is part of being human, this desire to know why. One patient told me, “I know ‘why’ isn’t a helpful question. I know there’s no answer. But sometimes I wonder if I did something wrong. Am I being punished? If so, maybe I can make it right. Maybe I can mend my ways, and then God will cure me.”…
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Free Will and Microbes Among Us
Not Captains of Our Souls The more we learn about the creatures who inhabit this planet with us, the more obvious it seems that, regardless of what William Ernst Henley believed, we are not the captain of our souls, nor can we master our fate. [1] Yes, to some degree we can choose how to respond to adversity, and this is really what his poem is about. Written when he lay ill with tuberculosis and feared he might lose a foot, which was especially worrisome because he’d already had one leg cut off when he was sixteen, Henley’s poem honors his courage and his “unconquerable soul.” His words have inspired…
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Choice, Transformation, and Love
The Nature of Reality Each January, as the year turns, we move into something new. We cross a threshold. We transition from memory to hope. The future spreads out before us, and possibilities abound. Many of us eagerly plan our resolutions, hoping they will transform turn us into the person we always wanted to be. Unfortunately, our plans rarely play out the way we expect them to. According to my elder son, this is because we have less control over our life than we like to think. For him, existence is an intricate interplay of events, occasions, thoughts, and experiences that weave and develop in ways beyond our comprehension. As…