Theodicy, Death, and the Laws of Nature II (Thomas Lynch)

The set of events (rather pointless to call them "unlikely") that resulted in the death of a young girl named Stephanie are provided on p 55, just prior to this section.  To briefly summarize, the family was driving through Kentucky on their way to Georgia for vacation.  Some local Kentucky boys, mischievous but not malevolent, were messing around in a local cemetery for fun.  They stole a headstone.  Getting tired of carrying it, they decided to toss it off the overpass.  It was at just this moment that Stephanie's van passed under:

The stone shattered the windshield, glanced off Stephanie's father's right shoulder, woke her mother riding in the passenger seat and, parting the space between the two front seats, struck Stephanie in the chest as she lay sleeping in the back seat.  She had just traded places with her younger brother who cuddled with his two sisters in the rear seat of the van.  It did not kill Stephanie instantly.  Her sternum was broken.  Her heart bruised beyond repair.

Words provide little comfort.  No explanation can dull the reality of it (I assume the story is true).  But Lynch cannot help but cycle through the various explanations:

Sometimes it seems like multiple choice.
    A: It was the Hand of God.  God woke up one Friday the 13th and said, "I want Stephanie!"  How else to explain the fatal intersection of bizarre events.  Say the facts slowly, they sound like God's handiwork.  If the outcome were different, we'd call it a miracle.
    Or B: It wasn't the Hand of God.  God knew it, got word of it sooner or later, but didn't lift a hand because He knows how much we've come to count on the Laws of Nature - gravity and objects in motion and at rest - so He doesn't fiddle with the random or deliberate outcomes.  He regrets to inform us of this, but surely we must understand His position.
    Or C: The Devil did it.  If faith supports the existence of Goodness, then it supports the probability of Evil.  And sometimes, Evil gets the jump on us.
    Or D: None of the above.  Shit happens.  That's life, get over it, get on with it.
    Or maybe E: All of the above, Mysteries - like decades of the rosary - glorious and sorrowful mysteries.

Each of the answers leaves my inheritance intact - my father's fear, my mother's faith.  If God's will, shame on God is what I say.  If not, then shame on God.  It sounds the same.  I keep shaking a fist at the Almighty asking 'Where were you on the morning of the thirteenth'?  The alibi changes every day.

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, p 56

Theodicy, Death, and the Laws of Nature (Thomas Lynch)

I'm reading Thomas Lynch's The Undertaking for Lent this year.

No way around these haunting realities:

But my father had seen, in the dead bodies of infants and children and young men and women, evidence that God lived by the Laws of Nature, and obeyed in statues, however brutal.  Kids died of gravity, and physics and biology and natural selection.  Car wrecks and measles and knives stuck in toasters, household poisons, guns left loaded, kidnappers, serial killers, burst appendices, bee stings, hard-candy chokings, croups untreated - he'd seen too many instances of His unwillingness to overrule the natural order, which included, along with hurricanes and meteorites and other Acts of God, the aberrant disasters of childhood.

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, p 45-46

“Just” a body? (Thomas Lynch)

Thomas Lynch, poet/undertaker, will be one of my literary companions this Lenten season.

Perhaps a proper Lenten beginning entails burying (pun intended) the idea that we should ever piously place the adverb “just”  prior to the noun “body” when we talk about the life and death of a human being.

"So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as it would if we were to say it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy.  Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from dead.  What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins?  What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself?  Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that?  Done the Crusades?  Burned witches?  Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.  If he’d raised anything less, of course, as Paul points out, the deacon and several others of us would be out of business or back to Saturday Sabbaths, a sensible diet, and no more Christmases."

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, p21