by Martha Sterne

We are not ever going to understand and control evil, suffering, and chaos.

God to Job about a leviathan or an alligator or something like that: Who can stand before it? Who can confront it and be safe? ( Job 41:10b–11) And Jesus to the sea in the storm: Peace! Be still! (Mark 4:39)

My parents were married in the living room of my grandparents’ home in Alexandria, Louisiana, on the afternoon of June 19, 1941. War was coming but Pearl Harbor hadn’t happened yet, and the timeless joy of a wedding day perfumed the air.

Of one thing we may be sure. It was hot. There were beautiful flowers from the yards of friends and neighbors, and my mother floated down the stairway on the arm of her father into the marriage that she had hoped for, even schemed about for a number of years. She told her grandchildren recently that she had spotted my father on his bicycle when he was 14 and she was 12, and she thought to herself, hmmm.

As far as his initial response to Mother, he was sort of oblivious at the time. The day she saw him sailing down the sidewalk with his blond hair flying and a lopsided grin on his face was the year before his father dropped dead of a heart attack and two years before his mother died of kidney disease.

Maybe it was hard to entertain romantic possibilities when your family had imploded. After his parents died, his older sisters took on parental responsibilities, and families in Alexandria and later in the small town of Sewanee, Tennessee (where he went to college), took him into their hearts.

I’m not sure how Mother overcame his inertia.
She doesn’t know either. All she remembers is that at the beginning of a very short train trip from New Orleans to Baton Rouge for a Tulane–LSU football game, he mumbled something to the effect that they were definitely Not Getting Married. And at the end of the train trip, he mumbled something like, "We’ll figure something out." Mother figured out that the "something" was they were Definitely Getting Married.

Although my father died 10 years ago, their wedding anniversary is, of course, still their wedding anniversary. Mother said she felt sort of sorry for herself this last go–around, but she has always been practical and inventive. So she invited a widowed friend over and said, "Now today is my wedding anniversary. So you tell me about your wedding, and I’ll tell you about mine."

My parents’ biggest anniversary bash was their golden wedding anniversary, back in 1991. They invited everybody still alive from their wedding era, as well as relatives like us who were born later. So most all of their relatives and their oldest friends gathered out in the country outside Natchez, Mississippi, at a beautiful place where Mother’s family has been living and reunioning for almost 200 years.

Much of the land is deep, dark woods full of songbirds and wild turkey and deer. Spanish moss drips from giant live oak trees, and a great blue heron sails among the ponds. You have to chase the cows out of the yard every once in a while, which gives the children and dogs something to look forward to. And you definitely need a can or two of bug spray, but that’s about it. It really is a peaceful sort of place, a kind of dark and green paradise.

It was just right for the occasion. After all, a 50th wedding anniversary is almost by definition a calm and gentle celebration of weathering the storms, of keeping the faith through the better and the worse, and the richer and the poorer, and the sickness and the health. It’s a homecoming time when people sit and maybe rock and smile and remember. So mostly that house party was "safe harbor" time. Except for one thing.

This alligator showed up.
We had never ever had an alligator on that place. And here was this thing — eight feet long if it was an inch — steaming up and down the pond closest to the house. Sometimes just his eyes showed. And sometimes he floated way up high so you could see from the tip of his snout to the end of his tail. He was huge.

Of course, immediately, alligator experts emerged among the crowd of friends and relations. Some surmised how he got there. Others told us how long he could stay under water and how fast he could move on land, the consensus being that he could outrun a beagle. Let me tell you how much the mothers of small children loved hearing that.

Some told us how much we could get for him per pound. One heard about the financial possibilities and climbed a tree and tried to lasso him. And then there was the expert who told us how to make him paddle over to you — not what I wanted to do for the after noon’s entertainment. But just in case there is somebody reading this who wants to know how to call an alligator, here’s what you do: You hit the water with a stick and bark like a dog.

All in all, our visitor kind of added to the festivity, and the Game and Fish warden said he’d come in a couple of days to trap the alligator and take him to a new home. We visited with each other and ate a lot and drank a little, and whenever there was a lull in the conversation, the alligator was a surefire attention getting subject.

But then on the third afternoon, oh dear.
The alligator disappeared, just vanished. We looked all around the house pond, and on into the late dusk–dark, different ones would go and watch the surface of the water for as long as any of the experts thought he could hold his breath. He was not anywhere to be seen. If you think seeing an eight–foot alligator is kind of scary, try not seeing one. Absolutely terrifying.

Did he crawl across the pasture over to the graveyard pond where the big children like to grab the rope swing and jump way out into the middle? Or did he lumber to the bream pond where the little ones learn how to canoe and the old ones fish? Or was he lying in wait in the thicket where we pick blackberries? Where, oh where, were the thrashing tail, the gaping jaws, the teeth, the danger, the chaos? Or was the alligator just gone, crawled back into the mystery from whence he came?

We said he was our first alligator. But really, he wasn’t. I believe every person at that party had run into alligators before. Most of our deepest fears are sort of alligator fears. The alligators we see — with horrifying clarity — gliding fast and hungry toward us or toward somebody we love. And then there are the alligators we don’t see — the ones holding their breath, biding their time, just under the surface — where they wait in the dark and the muddy places.

Some of us focus so much on the alligator in the landscape that we can’t see anything else — not the beauty or the possibilities or the companions around us. And some of us spend our whole lives worrying about the alligators that we don’t see, so, of course, we think they’re everywhere. And then there are those of us who jump right into alligator–infested waters, maybe because we are careless or foolish or proud or greedy or even just innocent.

The alligator — the chaos, the storm, the danger, the divorce, the illness, the crisis—and the human response — what you and I do in the midst of chaos — and the presence of God in chaos — these are profound issues of faith. And our trust — not in our alligator expertise but in God — is what we work out or try to avoid working out all of our lives.

So remember Job?
He can be our alligator teacher here. The winds blow. Illnesses menace. Friends get self-righteous. Money runs out. Loved ones die. The alligators lash their tails and snap their jaws. Fearful times. Bad times. And then from God Almighty comes even more bad news, or at least hard news.

For the strange and cross-shaped truth of catastrophe is a hard word literally spoken by God out of the storm, out of the whirlwind. And God’s hard word is that we are not ever going to understand, much less control the catastrophe — not us, not Job, not Job’s friends, not all the alligator experts in the world.

We are not ever going to understand and control the why and what and how of evil and suffering and chaos. That is the hard word of God in the whirlwind, in the chaos, in the alligators — hard news for human beings, limited, bound–up creatures that we are, living not in paradise but all of us living and dying east of Eden.

But after all, where were we when it all got made? When the foundation of the earth and the morning stars and the wild ox and the storehouses of snow and the home of the east wind and Leviathan and the soaring hawk and the springs of the sea and the dwelling of the light and the gates of death and the gates of deep darkness were made by God?

The hard news is that the Creator does not place us and our fears and our pain in the center of the universe. And we are never, ever going to control the chaos. We are sure never going to control God, not even by doing it all right, not even by our morality, not even by our faithfulness.

Job stayed faithful through the worst that can happen. And even then he cried, "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth...and I shall see God and not as a stranger." Job knew that. Job kept the faith. And he hurt bad, and the chaos swirled anyway. And that seems like bad news to me.

But listen.
Somewhere in the mystery of God — we don’t know how, we don’t know why—that hard word, the bad news, touches good news, touches gospel, touches grace. And the hard words of suffering and chaos and beyond our control, and the gentle words of grace and providence and redemption — are true and connected in a cross–shaped way that we cannot understand, we can only experience. Because the Word of God, hard and graceful, became flesh and dwelt among us. And still gets in the boat with us, right in the middle of the chaos and the storm. And speaks the Word, not only out of the storm but into the storm. And speaks, "Peace. Be still." Because God is Emmanuel. God is with us. And sooner or later the wind will cease. And there will be great calm.

P.S. We never found that particular alligator. But of course, there have been others. So it goes.

The Rev. Martha Sterne is rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Maryville, Tenn. She is author of two books, Earthly Good: Seeing Heaven on Earth (OSL Publications,2003) and Alive and Loose in the Ordinary: Stories of the Incarnation (Morehouse Publishing, 2006).