I spent the last weekend at Wintergrass. This is a bluegrass festival (indoors thankfully) in Tacoma Washington. This year, they had a lot of edge bands. Bands that have bluegrass influences, but could by no stretch of the imagine be called traditional bluegrass. The Paperboys, Scythian, Hot Buttered Rum, and Adrienne Young were some of my favorites of these bands.

Adrienne Young is just fantastic. Incredible music, songwriting, voice, band, the whole package. I consider her one of my "must buy" artists, even though I have always had vague uncomfortable feelings about some of her lyrics. Her latest album intensified this unease. It is called "All For Good."

The title song is incredible. Beautiful instrumentation, vocals, and great harmonies. It is my favorite song on the album, and I know the lyrics by heart. I just have a really hard time listening to it.

Here are the lyrics from her website:

Struggle is perfect and all that is here is for good 

The phrase "all for good" comes from Romans 8:28. This verse (and its surrounding context) are what first helped me stay a Christian as long as I did, and what ultimately broke my faith.

 Here is the verse:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

So first, here is a blog entry that talks about it in context and that pretty much matches up with what I had been taught since childhood: http://homewardbound-cb.blogspot.com/2008/03/all-for-good.html

There are much more shallow (and offensive) understandings of that verse than what that blog expresses. I think that blog would stand in for the most commonly held interpretation of the verse. 

My wife struggles with something that is somewhere between bi-polar disorder and epilepsy. Mainly she has really rapid mood swings and spends a lot of time fairly depressed. She has been better in recent years, but the 90s pretty much were hell. She was hospitalized 6 times for being suicidal between 1994 and 2001.

Both of us were Christians.

As the blog entry above stated "They’re not being promised that everything will go their way in this life; they’re being promised that everything they suffer here will benefit them in the world to come." I clung to this promise in the early days of my wife's illness, it helped me immensely through the first couple of hospitalizations. I didn't have to understand why this was happening to my wife, I could just trust that even if the worst happened, that God loved us and that were going to be with him.

I never believed the medieval interpretation of the unpardonable sin as being suicide, so from where I was coming from, I was starting to wonder if maybe it wouldn't be so bad if she did kill herself. I loved her so of course I wanted her to live, but I wouldn't have wished that level of suffering on my worse enemy, much less the love of my life and God, the medical community, friends and family were all helpless in its face. Maybe it was better if she went home to God... I could barely even think that to myself, so I clung to Romans 8:26 which said that God himself would intercede with my prayers with groanings too deep for words." That surely described our situation.

That worked the first couple of trips to the emergency room (Hey my wife hurts so badly that killing herself seems the only way to fix it, but all of this makes us more like Christ, and we will just go to him when we die so it is OK) but I soon realized the utter idiocy of that. What kind of prick would say "hey, I know you feel like killing yourself, but since it makes you more like me (I even let my son be killed...) we can both revel in how we both know intense sorrow, isn't it cool!"

C.S. Lewis, the book of Job and many others have attempted to explain how suffering and the God of the Bible can co-exist. I studied and studied all of them until my soul bled. This issue is so central that there is even a special word for it. Theodicy. The more I read and studied the more dissatisfied with this whole line of thinking I became. 

I can state this with upmost certainty: no good ever can justify what my wife and I went through. The same can be said for so many other situations (the Holocaust, rape, my father-in-law's cancer, and so many, many more). Attempting to tack the trite phrase "all for good" to any intense suffering is immoral. I AM a better man now for having gone through this. I am stronger and much more compassionate. BUT IT WAS NOT WORTH IT.

Ultimately, God did nothing. Nothing that mattered, nothing that helped, nothing that gave any hope, nothing that showed that he even existed. No pastor, friend, or family member of ours could stand up to the raw pain that we had and could offer any words with meaning. They all left in silence.

Shallow, stupid acquaintances would of course quote this verse in the worst possible way "just have faith, God will work it out for good in the long run." I wanted to slap them silly.

For a while, I became a deist. I couldn't stop believing in God, but I just couldn't believe in any personal God who could make those sorts of promises and then just not be there. The Buddhist position of "suffering exists, life is learning to deal with it" and the naturalists/atheist's much more informal position of "there is no god, shit happens, there is no blame, and there is no justification, there is no purpose" began to seem much more attractive. 

When I told one of my friends this I was shocked to hear his response: "that is so hopeless, how can you say that." I was shocked because this friend was not overly religious. I tried explaining that true hopelessness is when  you believe in a god that sits around an watches life mug you and leaves you bleeding on the sidewalk and says "hey, you will be with me some day so it is worth it."

I stayed a Deist for a while, but kept finding more and more things that just didn't need the God Hypothesis to make sense of the world. By the time, I could finally call myself an atheist, I was no longer fixated by the Problem of Pain, and had moved on to a more wholesale rejection of revealed dogma. I could find nothing in the Bible that was any more true than the writings of L Ron Hubbard's made up jibberish that I had previously railed against as being a "cult." The only difference was 1900 years of respectability.

I felt such a huge weight off of my back. I hadn't realized how oppressive faith had become until I could finally set it down. Our situation still sucked, but my whole view of the cosmos and of purpose and of meaning were no longer wrapped up in it. It just IS and you have to deal with it. Morality is trying to do the best in every situation, not in arbitrarily deciding which people can love each other, or any of the other flotsam left over from iron age times. It was the most liberating conversion experience I could imagine--every bit as intense as any conversion experience that any revival preacher had ever witnessed.

 Now, back to Wintergrass and Adrienne Young. She was my favorite performer of the entire festival. Her earnestness, graciousness and talent were on full display.  I got to see a little bit of who she is exposed in her performance.

I think that hearing her sing that song live finally let me really listen to the lyrics of the song and to identify with them. My gut still tightens with the phrase "all for good" but I can hear the rest of the song describe how I try to live my life. I would phrase it "constantly seeking the good" but I can now live with the biblical quote.

I think if she knew me, that she could also live with my previous unease. It is wonderful how live music connects people. She doesn't (and likely will never) know that I exist, much less how her concert impacted me. I know it, and I can fully enjoy her wonderful music now. That IS for the good.