A brief pause in the finger-pointing

My honors students this morning confronted the problem of pain when, in the first chapter of Cold Mountain, Inman asks a blind man "Who put out your pair of eyes," and the blind man answers "Nobody," an obvious echo of the scene in Homer's Odyssey when the Cyclops shrieks about the little nobody who has blinded him. But it's also, I reminded my students, an echo of the question Jesus is asked in John 9: "Who sinned, this man or his parents, that this man should be born blind?"

The desire to point a finger of blame when people suffer senselessly is almost irresistible, but like the blind man in Charles Frazier's novel, Jesus points the finger directly at Nobody. The blind man suffers not as a result of sin but to serve a larger purpose: so that the works of God might be seen in him. And this, in turn, reflects what Alcinous says in Book 8 of The Odyssey when he says the purpose of human suffering is "to make a song for those in times to come"--an idea that shows up in Cold Mountain when suffering inspires Stobrod's fiddle to new heights of healing sound.

Which is all well and good but on a day when my newsfeed is full of pictures of today's wildfires and yesterday's falling towers, it's not so comforting to think that such horrors happen so that someone in the future can make beautiful music or poetry or art. Can't we have beautiful music and poetry and art without suffering?

Still, we find comfort where we can. On a day of burning timbers and falling towers, Robinson Jeffers reminds us that "stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found / The honey peace in old poems," and W.S. Merwin in "Rain Light" bids us find comfort in what endures "even though the whole world is burning." 

I'm not interested right this minute in figuring out who is responsible for every horrible thing that's happened; instead I'll pause and reflect on those who work so hard to keep us safe and seek some honey of peace and comfort in the midst of the blaze.

So today I'm pointing the finger of blame at Nobody--but I'm not making any promises about tomorrow.