The Bad Things-Good People Question

“What is your philosophy of why bad things happen to good people?” my supervisor asked.

That’s clichéd, I thought.

I think addictions counseling is my next life’s work to do.  I seek a part-time position to complement my continuing, passionate work for our health software startup.  I don’t yet have a position, but found a supervisor, Wren Starkey, LPC, with whom to begin the process of becoming a Licensed Professional Counselor and from whom I wanted to learn immediately.

Her question came when I expressed my distress at the death of Cory Monteith, the actor who played Finn in the television series Glee. He died in July from an overdose of heroin combined with alcohol.  I have watched every episode of Glee multiple times.

“What is your philosophy of why bad things happen to good people?” my supervisor asked. “Your answer will guide you when it happens. Because, in addictions work, it will happen.”

Okay. Startlingly not clichéd at all.

My immediate answer? “For the same reason good things happen to bad people. No reason. It’s random. Life, as an abstraction, has no order, no purpose, no meaning. Attributing meaning to my life and to the lives of others is a choice I make.”

I read Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People years ago – and this is a gross simplification of his major premise:  God exists, God is good, God is unknowable, so we can’t know why the bad thing happened to the good person, but we need to accept, as an unknowable mystery, that the bad thing was really for the good. I appreciate Kushner’s views but was untouched by them and unable to embrace them.

The thought that life is random does not upset me. But it has upset humans for eons. Hence the existence of over 4000 religions. What does speak to me is Viktor Frankl‘s view of life reduced to its lowest terms as a concentration camp prisoner:

“Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation…man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment.”
– Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I love. Others are beloved to me. To the best of my ability to discern it at this time in my life, I “know bliss” in moments because I can become aware of them. Through “loving contemplation” or even just “contemplation,” I derive meaning from my life.

And yet. My supervisor’s question causes ripples.

• When a bad thing happens to one of my good clients, why will that have happened?
• As a counselor, how will I help my client handle bad things happening or having happened?
• How much power do I really have to help?  What is mine to do and what is the client’s to do?
• What if I were Cory Monteith’s addictions counselor?  What would I be feeling and thinking as a result of learning he had died from his addiction?

I hear “Life is random” echoing coldly off walls where someone once was and is no more. How, then, will love be my salvation?

I see the imperative of deriving an answer that will guide me.