The title of my talk, When Bad Things Happen to All Kinds of People, is a fragment of a sentence; it calls out for an ending, and I'm completing it in the form of two questions this morning:

When bad things happen to all kinds of people, how can we best understand it? and, When bad things happen to all kinds of people, how can we best respond?

These are not theoretical questions, are they? You can all provide your own examples of awful occurrences which have faced you or those close to you. I remember particularly a young woman in another congregation who was facing the sudden, devastating illness of her brother and then his death. This horrible occurrence brought back other deep, sad memories for her, and she was moved to ask the fundamental religious questions, "What does it all mean? How can we make sense of a life in which such things can happen, without warning and without apparent cause?" Like that woman, and like you in all likelihood, I am only part-way to answering those questions, but they're ones I've thought about deeply, and I'll share some of my thoughts with you.

You may be familiar with the book by Rabbi Harold Kushner, which inspired the title of this talk, called "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." Rabbi Kushner would agree, I think, that both his title and mine are incomplete, because it's not only bad things but all kinds of things that happen to all kinds of people. Some of the good things are problematic, too. Why did that jerk win the lottery? Why did the dictator and mass murderer have such a pleasant home life and devoted family? Why does the chain-smoker live to be 95? It doesn't seem fair, any more than the heart attack which kills the fit and healthy jogger.

Rabbi Kushner writes from the point of view of a committed theist, whose faith that God exists was sorely tested by the long illness and eventual death at age 14 of his son, Aaron. Kushner keeps his faith in God, but it's a faith modified by his experience: he can no longer believe that God is both all-good and all-powerful. God is evidently powerless to prevent some evils, he says, but God is able to sustain us and help us as we face those evils.

I've reached a similar position, though I tend to be even more hesitant than Kushner to make any statements about what God can or cannot do -- or the gods or goddesses, or the Life Force, as some of us may prefer to call it. My experience tells me that I am helped and supported by something greater than myself which I call God, not having found a better word, but my experience says nothing about what the ultimate cause of my joys or my sorrows is.

I'm more or less in the dark about how the world works, outside my own particular life, though I try to take in as much as I can understand of what the scientists and philosophers and other thoughtful and observant people discover. I find myself in much the same position as the non-theist, who has no experience of divine presence and who tries to understand the universe purely in terms of the mental construct we call physics. I don't see any rational basis for assuming that there's a divine purpose behind the events that occur on earth, the good things and the bad, delights and disasters, births and deaths. I think they just are.

And yet, you know, I absolutely can’t avoid the conviction that there are patterns to events which defy rational explanation -- synchronicities and serendipities which go beyond the purely random in some way. Perhaps it's just a function of the human mind (or at least of some human minds) to discern patterns, or make patterns, out of chance occurrences, or perhaps there really are connections, independent of our minds, which might even be explained some day in physical terms, rather in the same way that more and more areas of outer space become known to us. I don't think seeing these connections commits us to the idea that there's a purpose to everything that happens, any more than seeing how diet affects health means that a good diet will guarantee good health.

As I look back over things that have happened to me and say (in relation to my coming to Waterloo, for example), "The timing was so perfect; it was obviously meant to be," there's a half-joking, half-serious quality about my words. On the one hand, I don't believe that God, or Fate, or the effect of the Big Bang, has decided exactly what's going to happen from the beginning to the end of the world, for some inscrutable purpose -- and it would have to be inscrutable, because so much of it simply doesn't make any possible sense to our minds!

On the other hand, when I let myself be really self-centred for a little while, and imagine that everything that's ever happened in my life has been part of some careful plan for me -- well, it certainly makes more sense than seeing it as pure chance. There's a classic argument for the existence of God called the argument from design -- looking at the intricacies of how the world works and saying that someone must have designed it. I've never found it convincing on that universal level, but I find it very persuasive on the personal level, the level of my life. And it's not just when I look at the good things, either -- the horrible times of my life are essential parts of the design I can see, though of course I wouldn't have been able to see them that way at the time they were happening.

Seeing the possible design in things, from a comfortable distance, doesn't help much when the things are happening. In fact, to see purpose or design in our personal disasters is probably to distance ourselves from what's happening in a way that prevents us from living the moment fully. The attempts that well-meaning people make to comfort us in times of trouble by talking about God's will, or a greater good than we can understand, can never be as helpful as simply holding our hand while we cry or keep an agonized silence. We need to experience the sorrow in all its senselessness if we're to avoid becoming desensitized to pain, like a rock, unable to get the message of the pain, the message that life is incredibly fragile and uncertain and precious.

The atheists, agnostics and theists among us -- all of us alike, whatever our convictions, have to confront the harsh facts of life, just as Job had to in a famous Bible story. Those of you who know the story will recall that although Job was able to keep his cool when his possessions and his children were taken away, he lost it when his health went. Covered with loathsome boils and sores, with nothing good left in his life at all, Job gave up pretending that everything was O.K. and cursed the day he was born.

The remaining 40 chapters of the book are about his struggles to make sense of the whole thing -- after all, he'd led a good life, and if there was any justice in the world at all he wouldn't be subjected to such a terrible fate. Perhaps the reason the Book of Job has endured as a great piece of literature is that it doesn't come up with any easy answer to the problem of bad things happening to good people; the closest it comes to an answer seems to be, "Things simply happen. We have no right to an explanation, and if there is one it doesn't come at the right time."

I think this is, indeed, the most satisfactory answer to today's first question, "When these things happen, how can we best understand it?" We can best understand it as the way the world is, and since we didn't make the world, we have no basis for demanding that it should be any particular way rather than another. It's a nasty shock when we first find out that no matter how rational we may be, the world isn't. Oh, there's a lot of cause and effect that we can understand, no doubt about that -- we can stir up a cake batter and put it in the oven and be fairly sure it's going to turn out to be a cake, as long as the oven’s working properly -- and there's plenty of predictability, at least, about the things we can't control, such as the sunrise.

At the interface of cause-and-effect and predictability, we know (for instance) that if we smoke heavily we greatly increase our chances of getting lung cancer. But we may not. And the non-smoker may. There's no guarantee. Much of life is sheer chance -- or if there's some order, it's utterly beyond our capacity to understand. There certainly no indication of any benevolent intention behind the randomness, as far as I can see. It's just there, and when bad things happen to us, the sensible response seems to be, "Oh, sh -- oot!" When the bad things happen to other people, we can more helpfully hold their hands than try to explain the reason. "Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons; wise folk never try."

And this begins to answer the second question: "When these things happen, how can we best respond?" If we stop at "Oh, how awful!", we may well be immobilized. At some point, it's necessary to move on -- unless the disaster is so utterly overwhelming as to make suicide the understandable response. For today, let's put aside the matter of whether or when suicide may make sense, and acknowledge that most of the time there are better responses.

I'm going to offer you now a smorgasbord of possible responses from the world's religions, a list of responses which has come across my desk and through the internet several times in various forms. The list is usually headed with a four-letter word, but to respect the dignity which some of you still expect of me, I'll call it "Stuff". ....... Stuff happens, and here are some of the ways we may decide to understand it and cope with it. In the spirit of our Unitarian Universalist faith, let's try to see the truth in each way.

Stuff happens (bad stuff!). In the ancient Taoist tradition, from China, that's all that can sensibly be said. In that religion, labelling things good or bad, trying to understand them or make sense of them, is all an attempt at manipulation, a refusal to simply "go with the flow". The proper response to the things that happen to us is simply, "It happens" and nothing more. "Wu wei" is the Chinese phrase meaning, "Nothing to be done." Stuff happens. We in the western world are so far removed from this approach to life, so immersed in the belief that there's always something to be done, that it takes considerable and paradoxical effort to let ourselves go with the flow. I think it's worth considering, at least, that there are times when there really is nothing to be done, when we can't control what's happening or our own feelings about what's happening, and the right response is: stuff happens.

Hinduism, with its belief in reincarnation and what some philosphers have called "the eternal recurrence of the same", responds, "This stuff has happened before", or (in a variation), "This stuff is the result of what happened before". It's interesting to speculate that the Hindu response to Job's complaint that he's been a good guy and doesn't deserve this bad stuff might be, "Sure, you've been good in this life, but what about the previous ones?"

What I try to learn from this religion is a sense of proportion and perspective: there really is very little new under the sun, and our individual lives are so brief in the history of time that it's hardly surprising we can't grasp the cause and effect relationships which may be there though incomprehensible to us. And if there's an everturning wheel of life, it means that the good stuff will come around again as well as the bad. "This too shall pass", as some of us say in times of trouble. Hindus, like Universalists, reject the idea that any of the bad stuff is forever.

In Buddhism, the sense of perspective and proportion is enhanced by the recognition that not only are our lives tiny and brief, but our grasp of reality is very much conditioned by our limited and imperfect minds. The Buddhist asks, "When bad stuff happens, is it really bad?"

We're all aware that some people at most times, and most of us at some times, suffer from minor illusions or serious delusions about what actually is so. Buddhism asks us to consider that our minds may be fundamentally wrong about what's real; it suggests the possibility of an enlightenment which may take us out of the suffering world that our minds have constructed and into a greater reality where bad stuff doesn't exist. From Buddhism, I take the hope of an enlightened outlook, in which the divisions between separate entities and beings and times and places will disappear from my sight and I will see things in the clear light of unity and wholeness.

And the ancient religion which is closest to most of us: Judaism. When bad stuff happens, a typical, perhaps stereotypical, Jewish response would be: "Why does this stuff always happen to us?" Of course, we all have some of this response in us, some sense that we're the persecuted victims of an unjust world. Not an unjust God -- faithful loyalty to the goodness of God is a cornerstone of Judaism -- but a weary sense of having been singled out for the bad stuff, chosen for some unclear and terrible purpose, and along with that sense a stubborn determination to endure it.

Those of us who identify with this position in face of the bad stuff may find ourselves becoming negative and pessimistic about life in general, although we tend not to give up in despair. Rather, we plod gamely on, trusting that there's some purpose to it all, though we don't expect to see the purpose fulfilled in our lifetime. I'm grateful to Judaism for all it has taught us about endurance, and I want to stretch the limits of my own endurance which often seem pitifully narrow.

In Islam, which is so closely related to our own Jewish and Christian heritage, there's an ambivalent attitude, with which we can probably empathize, towards the bad things that happen. On the one hand, the proper Islamic response when bad things happen is to say, "It's the will of Allah"; on the other hand, a far more active and confrontative stance is taken towards existence than in the oriental religions. Human beings are to work and even to fight for the victory of good over evil, but ultimately they have to subject themselves to the supreme Ruler who decides the outcome of all the struggles.

There's a useful reminder in Islam, I think, about the balance that's needed between action and acceptance, and I take from this faith the attitude reflected in the prayer about accepting the things we cannot change, having the courage to change the things we can, and seeking the wisdom to know the difference.

And then, there's Christianity, the religion best-known to many of us, and so diverse that we need to divide it into at least two strands, Catholic and Protestant. Catholics might respond to bad stuff by saying, "If bad stuff happens, I deserve it" -- the old guilt response.

Now, as I've said, I don't believe that there are always direct or necessary relationships between what we do and what happens to us; nor do I believe that we can always see the cause and effect relationships that may sometimes be there, or that it's helpful to look for causes when there's nothing to be done about them. But I find two useful points in the Catholic type of response to bad stuff: first, in a chancy universe we "deserve" bad stuff just as much as good stuff; and second, sometimes what we do has bad consequences, and guilt is not always misplaced.

If we know we behaved abusively to our parents, and they cut us out of their will, some remorse seems appropriate along with our anger -- and some willingness to learn from the bad stuff. But when we ask ourselves, "Do I deserve this bad stuff?" and answer "No, I don't think so", we certainly don't need anyone else persuading us that we're guilty. Chance nearly always plays a big role, even if it's the luck of the temperament you were born with.

A typical Protestant Christian response to bad things happening might be, "Bad stuff won't happen if I work harder" -- not so much guilt as an ethic of duty and responsibility to avoid bad things. The great sociologist Max Weber pointed out that Protestants of the Calvinist type tend to have an underlying sense that if they work hard enough they'll be able to demonstrate to the world, through their prosperity, that they're among God's chosen ones, the elect. I think this concept is extremely and destructively prevalent in North American society in such notions as the poor having only themselves to blame because they could get themselves off welfare. But I think the truth in it is that there are things we can do to help ourselves and improve our chances of having good stuff happen. There'll never be guarantees, but we're not entirely helpless all the time. We can't do everything, but we can do something.

On the list of world religious responses to bad stuff, from which I've been drawing, humanism isn't included. But it's probably the word which would include most of us here, though we might variously call ourselves agnostic humanists, atheistic or theistic humanists, Christian humanists, or some other modified kind of humanist. How do we typically respond to bad things happening, and how might we best respond?

I think we range in our responses all the way from the passive, "Stuff happens," to the determined, "Bad stuff won't happen if I work harder". With our humanist faith in human potential and human will, we probably tend more to the latter response, and we may be hit extra badly when life shows us that hard work and determination may count for nothing in the face of random disaster. What I would hope for all of us is that we keep always in mind the limitations of our human ability to understand the workings of the world and remember that the only kind of guilt that’s any good is the kind that stimulates action, rather than paralyzing us.

In closing, I want to suggest two specific responses to the bad things which happen to us, responses which I don't think can ever go too far wrong if we're able to make them. One is the kind of response which led to the formation of groups like MADD, "Mothers Against Drunk Driving" and bereavement support societies. The transformation of tragedy into constructive action isn't always so dramatic; it might take the form of remembering a baby's death with a gift of baby clothes to a needy family at Christmas, or becoming more informed about the diabetes which afflicts you so that you can help others. And sometimes the transformation needs to wait till long after the bad stuff happens, until it's been fully experienced and grieved. But it's nearly always possible for the transformation to happen, if we make room for it.

The second always-good response is similar, though it's more inward than outward-looking. It was put into words for me in an article I read in a Marriage and Family Therapy journal, which suggested this as a therapeutic response to someone in the later stages of grief:

"We know that you did not ask for this grief, and would in fact have done anything to avoid it. But suppose that in fact, in some former life or from some other perspective, you had chosen to undergo this situation for the sake of learning something. What might be the lesson that you wanted to learn?"

Some of you may recognize in this question echoes of Viktor Frankl and his "logotherapy" or "meaning" therapy. Frankl found that a sense of meaning could take people through concentration camps, bereavement, illness and all imaginable suffering. I, too, believe that meaning is powerful. I ask you to consider today that when bad things happen to all kinds of people, the most important question is not what its meaning is from the past, in terms of cause or deserving, but its meaning for the future, in terms of learning and commitment.

May we all be given the grace to transform what happens to us into something rich and lovely and full of meaning. And may we help one another to do it.