Today happens to be a special personal milestone for me: June 13 marks the day, 24 years ago, that I walked out of the active ministry and into a life of recovery. It was one of the most significant watershed points in my life and, not surprisingly, it came just before my 38th birthday . . . just as I was entering wholesale into midlife. I have focused my writing on the spiritual transformations of midlife because I consider myself to be a poster child for that transition. Relatively few people that I have met can actually point to a date on the calendar and say, “That’s when midlife hit me full-force,” but I think I can!
I usually spend my Saturday mornings with a community of recovering people, and yesterday was no exception. As always happens, I came away from our discussions with new insights and perspectives. I don’t know about you, but my ‘forgetter’ works much more effectively than my ‘rememberer,’ so I need regular doses of reality to keep me from floating away mentally, emotionally, and spiritually into La-la Land. Somebody yesterday mentioned ‘evil’ and it got me to thinking. I have a particular approach to the topic of evil that I’ve developed over many years and many experiences, and I thought that my readers might gain some fresh insights if I were to take this opportunity to explore it a little: What is ‘evil’ and why do we seem to be battling it so fiercely, particularly as we transition to full maturity?
Any student of moral philosophy worth her/his salt should be able to explain to you that there are two types of evil: physical evil and moral evil. Looking at physical evil first will help us to put moral evil into much better perspective. Although we use the same word (‘evil’) to refer to physical and moral failure, the two are only analogous. In fact, physical ‘evil’ is not evil at all: it is simply a set of natural phenomena that cause us humans pain and suffering. Things like natural disasters, disease, and even death itself are only considered really ‘evil’ when they affect human lives. What distinguishes Hurricane Katrina from a similar nameless storm in the mid-Pacific Ocean is only its effect on humanity. But, neither of them in themselves are really ‘evil.’ They’re both just storms.
What we call ‘physical evil’ is simply a characteristic of the natural universe. If we could possibly imagine the universe before the Big Bang, we’d have to conjure up an undifferentiated flyspeck of matter/energy/space/time/consciousness with absolutely no distinction between ‘this’ and ‘that’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’. What creation, expressed in the Big Bang, set in motion was a process of separation and distinction based on limitations. Follow me now: ‘this’ is limited because it’s not ‘that’; ‘here’ is limited because it’s not ‘there’; ‘now’ is limited because it’s not ‘then’; and, ultimately, ‘I’ am limited because I am not ‘you’. In spiritual terms, creation happened when a Higher Power allowed the ‘not’ — the limitation and separation of one entity from another — to intrude into the undifferentiated fabric of all that is.
What we call ‘physical evil’ is simply our human experience of the limitations inherent in the fabric of the universe of creation. No limitations: no universe! Yet, as soon as limitations and boundaries are introduced, simultaneously the reality of destruction and loss appears. Yet, (as far as we are aware) only human consciousness experiences physical limitations and boundaries that way. Only humanity sees limitation and judges it to be disaster and tragedy. From a purely physical (creational) perspective, Katrina was a very, very good hurricane! It expressed the functioning of the laws of the natural world perfectly.
What we call ‘physical evil’ intrudes into our human existence in a particularly emphatic way at midlife. It’s in grappling with the whole spectrum of our own limitations that we come, at long last, to a deeper and much more realistic appraisal of who we are in the context of our world than we had ever had before during our adult lives. We become aware of what happens when our personal beliefs meet life’s limitations head-on. Midlife is our time to grapple spiritually with our human limitations, and to overcome them not by denying them, nor by trying to conquer them, but by coming to terms with them. In the same way that we could never appreciate a red rose by wishing it was any other color, we are given the opportunity to find our own personal destiny by discovering the beauty and magnificence that is revealed only in and through our limitations. We learn (though hard experience) to love who we are, rather than who we wish we were.
When we are able to remember that ‘physical evil’ is simply our experience of the very warp and woof of creation, we can learn that our difficulties are not tragedies or disasters at all; they are opportunities for transcendence. They are invitations to correct our course, to rise to each new challenge, and to go beyond, not our limitations, but our beliefs about our limitations. The challenges of midlife force us to confront and either overcome or succumb to the unreality of our belief system. That is what happened to me 24 years ago. I did not realize that of which I was capable until I was forced by necessity to let go of my own limited worldview and adapt to the one that brought me to my knees (literally and figuratively). It began (but has not yet completed) my transition to full maturity as a “spiritual being having a human experience.”*
What about moral evil, then? How does that relate to the limitations inherent in the universe? Moral evil is simply our recognition that we as human beings are ultimately free. If we are free, then we have real, fundamental choices. At any juncture, we can choose to accept and live within the limitations of the physical world, or not. If we choose the latter, we choose to live in an insane world where our beliefs bear no resemblance to facts. We can choose to ignore our commitments, to disvalue ourselves and others, to deny our spiritual (or physical, for that matter) nature. We can run from and avoid life’s lessons and refuse to grow. We can jam our distorted and dysfunctional worldview into others’ reality by demanding our own way, by perpetrating injustice, by causing sadness, suffering and even death in our world. Moral evil is nothing more or less than our exercising our choice to say ‘no’ instead of ‘yes’ to our world and to our God.
What about moral evil in our world? What about the “inhumanity of man against man”? We human beings must confront the limitations of our universe on a daily, hourly, even minute-by-minute basis. We are never free from our responsibility to live life on life’s terms. A very real, although unfortunate, aspect of those terms is the fact that some of those limitations come at the hands of other humans. Yet, from our perspective, there is no more ‘blame’ to be placed on another human than there is on the limitations in the physical universe. Responsibility for moral evil (refusal to grow and mature) falls on the heads of the perpetrators. It falls on our own heads when we find ourselves as the perpetrators, and we need to go through the process of apology. Yet, our responsibility as the receivers of injustice is simply to grow beyond it. We are 
never ‘victims’ of injustice, any more than we are ‘victims’ of a hurricane or earthquake.
“Father,” Jesus prayed from his crucifixion, “forgive them. They know not what they do.” Our job as students of life’s lessons rests in asking, “What is my lesson in this?” and responding appropriately to our nature as spiritual beings. It is not to blame, punish, or exact retribution. Even those, like Viktor Frankl, who endured the Nazi death camps, had the choice to allow the holocaust to destroy their essential humanity or to rise to an incredible level of spiritual maturity. We’ll never know the heights and depths of spiritual experience that literally millions of people encountered during that war.
Was Nazi inhumanity therefore a good thing, because it deepened our spiritual awareness as individuals and as a human family? Of course not. War is always moral evil on stark and pointed display. Yet every time one woman or man confronts moral evil and accepts that experience as an opportunity to rise above it, s/he takes that opportunity to transform it into a moment of spiritual growth for our entire human family — and sadly, we have yet so far to grow.
Why do bad things happen to good people? Because we’re human and we live in a universe defined by its limitations. Without confronting the limitations imposed on us by the universe at large, we would never learn to cope with our own human limitations. We would never discover how powerfully we are led and guided by a Power Greater than ourselves. We would be incapable of ever fulfilling our destiny either as individuals or as a human species. Am I happy that my own limitations brought me down and laid me low 24 years ago today? Happy? No. Grateful? Yes. I had the opportunity to see where my dysfunctional beliefs were threatening me, and I had the opportunity to change my mind and, by the grace of God, I took the chance, rose to the occasion, and did what I had to do. Like the poet, Robert Frost, exclaimed,
| Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— |
| I took the one less traveled by, |
| And that has made all the difference. |
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown
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