unreasonable

• Why did my 5-year old get leukemia, wail from the pain and die unquietly?

• Why did his last remaining son get car bombed on his way to work?

• Why did her brother believe that he was cleansing his doors of perception when he drank lye and burned holes in his veins and melted his organs?

• Why did my mom spend 14 years in a coma never to wake up?

• Why did the 5 foot 4 English teacher stand up to his 6 foot 3 son-in-law for beating his daughter only to have his body found buried in the woods?

• Why did she have to leave her home at 16 to pick up enough body parts, stuff them into a Red Cross sack, and convince the ones in charge that it was a whole person so they could take another wounded into the tent?

Is there a reason for these things?

Of course, say the believers. Look to the 3rd law of thermodynamics or attachment disorder or transgression against God or lateral movements across longitudes or level 3 severity DSM-5 borderline PD or Yahweh’s wrath or migration patterns or the curse of Canaan or gravity or bad luck.

• Why did he risk and lose his own life to save a stranger?

• Why does she spend what little she has to secretly make and hand out sandwiches with love notes to the hungry?

• Why does he call for his people to forgive them those who have taken everything they hold most dear and more away?

• Why does she counsel the dying with joy while her own body is ravaged with an excoriating cancer?

• Why does he with no legs who has taken lives work tirelessly to teach children how to grow food?

How do we make sense?

No one is untouched by sorrow, uncaressed by suffering. Yet every day we the people planet are graced with innumerable unprofitable acts of sublime generosity and kindness.

Nothing happens for a reason. There are no reasons.

The only purpose for why anything that happens in this world is so we can tell the tale.

Parables and anecdotes

Of horror and delight

Of losing and loving

become webs

of thought

cause entire systems

of belief

to arise.

We may think one system is better than another because of proof or faith, but all of it all comes down to one thing: underneath the bleeding and the teething is the story.