Some Things Are Still Not Easy: Duane W. H. Arnold, PhD

Some Things Are Still Not Easy

In the early 1990s, I was on the staff of a church in New York City. As part of my pastoral responsibilities, I made pastoral calls at a research hospital in which the seventh- and eighth-floor wards had been given over to patients with HIV/AIDS. This was before the “cocktail” of drugs that promised relief and recovery had been devised. Essentially, if you were admitted to one of those wards, it was highly probable that you were going to die. Sadly, people did die, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands.

There was little that you could do as a priest apart from being present. You talked with the patient. You held a hand. You spoke with the mother, father, brother, sister, partner, or friend who sat in a chair on the other side of the bed. You could always pray. Often, you administered extreme unction, anointing the patient with oil and knowing that you would not see that person again in this life. Many times, you attended or presided at the funeral or memorial service that followed. It was an aspect of ministry that was difficult and draining. It was also theologically taxing, because one was always asked the question, “Why?” I would often have to say, “Some things are not easy to understand.”

Nearly thirty years later, another disease filled hospital wards and separated the dying from those who loved them. The AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic were profoundly different, and the comparison should not be pressed too far. Yet both confronted the priest with the same terrible limitation: there were wounds that could not be explained or repaired, only entered with another person. During the first months of COVID-19, however, even that ministry of presence was often impossible. Pastors and priests could not sit beside the bed, hold the hand of the patient, or stand with the family. Many could offer prayers only by telephone or through a screen. They carried the grief of absence as well as the grief of death.

When I first wrote about this in the spring of 2020, approximately 40,000 Americans had died. We did not yet know how long the pandemic would last, how many lives it would claim, or how deeply it would divide us. In time, more than a million deaths would be reported in the United States. Vaccines and new treatments would save innumerable lives, yet many people would continue to live with the enduring effects of infection. Behind every number stood a person, and around every person stood a circle of absence: an empty place at the table, a voice no longer heard, a life divided into before and after.

We should remember with gratitude the nurses, physicians, chaplains, aides, technicians, and hospital staff who cared for the sick when fear was everywhere and knowledge was incomplete. Many went beyond the requirements of their work to become a human presence for those who otherwise would have died alone. They held telephones to bedsides, conveyed final words, and stood in for families who could not enter the room. The question of “Why?” remained, but it was often tucked behind the exhaustion of extended shifts, the grief of repeated loss, and the necessity of receiving yet another patient.

The pandemic also revealed our hunger for easy explanations. Some declared that it was the judgment of God. Others called it a hoax or a conspiracy. Still others treated ordinary measures of communal responsibility as persecution. Faced with something we could neither control nor fully comprehend, we reached for explanations that promised certainty and gave us someone to blame. Complexity became intolerable. Patience seemed like weakness. Expertise was dismissed because it could not offer absolute assurance. The difficulty was not simply that we lacked easy answers. It was that we were unwilling to live without them. Yet, some things are not easy.

For most of us, our lives are complex. There may be people whose lives have followed a straight and uninterrupted line, but I have not met them. Most of us live with good decisions and bad ones, unexpected joys and wounds that never entirely disappear. We wonder how we became who we are and how we arrived where we now stand. Rainer Maria Rilke counseled a young poet to “live the questions now,” trusting that one might someday, gradually and almost unnoticed, live into the answers. In the experience of our own lives, we learn that understanding cannot always be hurried. We learn the need for patience, endurance, and sometimes self-denial.

The same is true of faith. Anyone in a pulpit who offers an instant solution to the mystery of suffering is offering something other than the Gospel. The Gospels are filled not with instant answers but with an incessant call to discipleship: take up the cross, endure to the end, lose your life in order to find it. Many of us are not in the same theological place in which we began. We have learned, grown, taken detours, and sometimes found our way back by a road we could not have imagined. Faith is not the possession of easy answers. It is, as the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us, “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

Christian faith also gives us the language of lament. Ultimately, Job is never given the tidy explanation that his friends attempted to provide. The Psalms permit us to ask how long God will remain hidden and why we have been forsaken. At the tomb of Lazarus, Christ does not begin with an argument. He weeps. The Christian response to suffering is not first an explanation. It is the presence of God within suffering and the calling of the Church to make that presence visible. We enter the hospital room. We sit in the silence. We anoint the sick, commend the dying, bury the dead, and continue to speak their names.

This is why the ministry of presence matters. Presence does not remove pain or solve the problem of evil. It refuses, however, to allow suffering to become solitary. The oil traced upon a forehead, the hand held through the night, the telephone call, the prayer spoken when no other words remain—these are modest acts. Yet they proclaim something essential: you are not abandoned; your life is not reducible to an illness; your death will not erase your name. In such moments, the Church becomes what it is called to be—the Body of Christ, wounded yet present in the midst of a wounded world.

The events of recent years should have also taught us that accountability and humility belong together. We must examine failures of preparation, public policy, institutional leadership, and pastoral judgment. We must tell the truth about the unequal burdens borne by the poor, the elderly, minority communities, and those whose work placed them in danger. Yet accountability cannot become another means of avoiding our own responsibility. A truthful reckoning asks not only who failed us, but where we failed one another—and how we might become a more faithful, compassionate, and prepared society.

Six years on from the pandemic, I cannot say that I have lived myself into all the answers. Some answers never came. We developed vaccines and treatments; but we did not cure our fear, our suspicion, or our eagerness to divide the world into the innocent and the guilty. We learned how much could be accomplished through sacrifice and cooperation, yet we also discovered how fragile our common life had become. COVID-19 receded from the center of public attention, but it did not disappear. Neither did the bereavement, disability, exhaustion, and moral injury left in its wake.

What remains for me is the conviction formed long ago in those hospital rooms: when we cannot explain suffering, we may still refuse to abandon those who suffer. We may sit beside them, speak their names, anoint them, pray with them, and remember those whom the world is too eager to forget. We may hold our questions before God without pretending that they have been resolved. This is not an easy answer. It is not, in fact, an answer at all. It is a form of faithfulness.

Some things are not easy.

Love seldom is.

Duane W. H. Arnold, PhD