"Was It Really Meant to Be?"

I’m not sure why when someone says, “Everything happens for a reason”, or “It was meant to be”, I feel like I need some Mylanta. Is it because the people who say that read horoscopes or forward emails with the letters J-E-S-U-S dancing across the computer screen? Is it because it’s brother to things like, “He’s in a better place now”, and “It’ll turn out for the best”, or “It’s only because God has something better planned”?

In clumsy attempts to comfort, I’m guilty, too, of pulling out trite comments. That need to say something, to weigh in like one of Job’s counselors, to hurriedly slap a Bandaid on a ragged and ugly wound, makes us say things that are at best sentimental if not downright untrue.

Remarks like that make me feel this vague sadness, much like the way I feel when I hear the word “devotional”, or see “Precious Moments” in gift shops, or peruse the Christian fiction in our church library. It’s that sense of quasi-religiousity, of there being the suggestion of something holy and good, but it’s wafer-thin, worn-out, cheaply or poorly wrought.

Comments said so nonchalantly, automatically, bother me because I believe that world views and eternal destinies hinge on the veracity of these statements. Does everything happen for a reason? Calvinists, Muslims, Hindus, and Darwinists can all say yes to that, and that’s why the statement is irksome. It pretends to be something when it’s nothing, but then again it could be something really big, because it could actually be true.

It’s just that these things are said so easily and so often that they’ve become lingo, and as such do more harm than good, because they’re applied to situations that beg for real answers, not platitudes. And I think that platitudes have been churned out by demons below for the purpose of keeping us from actually thinking. (Yes, I’ve just re-read Screwtape Letters.)

We want to whisk the pain away, paint a rosy future, answer the questions swiftly before they have a chance to penetrate, explain life without really explaining it. We give a little nod to the gods, or fate, or old-time religion, so that we don’t have to face the one God, who, as God, cannot be contained, made-to-order, tamed.