It's towards the end of John Hull's diary entries on his transition into blindness, Touching the Rock1, that he begins to wonder if his blindness can be a kind of gift. He starts out not entirely comfortable with this idea, but Hull seemed to grow into it, that the blindness that afflicted his later life was a gift because it enabled him to come to know so many things he otherwise would not have.
I'm uncomfortable with the idea too. It bothers me to think that non-moral evils: sickness, tragedy, death, accident, etc, should be considered "gifts". I'm not quite convinced that's the right way to frame it.
Blindness was a loss for Hull, an unequivocal loss. We shouldn't be to quick to reframe evils in the world as gifts. It skips a step a very important one. To say to a cancer patient, "oh, you realise your cancer is a gift, right?" probably deserves a punch in the face.
It might be better to say, that through non-moral evils2 God is at work to produce goods. Not that Hull's blindness was itself a gift, but without that terrible loss he would never have come to the insights and realisations that he did, especially about sight and blindness and the Scriptures, and disability, inclusiveness, and the church.
Again, we shouldn't skip a step. It's insulting to say, "well, you're going to learn a lot through this misfortune", even if that's true. What we miss when we do this is that we fail to acknowledge, and mourn, that suffering really is a bad thing. Instead of silver linings, we reframe the cloud as if it were all silver.
Is death, top, a gift? I'm reminded of this essay on Tolkien, and how mortality is framed as a gift in Middle Earth. Death is a strange kind of gift. It's judgment mixed with merciful blessing. It means that we are not bound to live a limitless serial existence in a fallen world. To do so, to live forever in our current state, is a curse. That's why zombies and vampires are the way they are: both forms of unlife (and undeath) are curses. They aren't living forever, they are forever neither dead nor alive. I think we (somewhat understandably) cannot really fathom what eternal resurrection life might be like, because we can't think of life as not bound by time and its cousin decay.
No-one says that cancer, or blindness, or countless other afflictions are gifts they wanted. They aren't. But they are a kind of strange and terrible gifting. In that God no doubt uses suffering to refine who we are. Sufferings, small and great, make us who we are.
They are, then, in a dark and paradoxical way, gifts. We don't want them. We'd gladly trade them back. But sometimes the miracle isn't the healing, it's who God makes people to be through the trials.
So far as I know I don't have cancer, nor likely to go blind any time soon. I am fated to die, though. And like any human, in this life have my own sorrows and griefs to bear. Even the small ones are strange and paradoxical gifts. I would gladly not have them, but I gladly receive who they are making me to be.
As Job says, “shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?”
John M. Hull, an Australian-born British Theologian. I was reading this book in order to reflect more on blindness, because it came highly recommended, and justly so.
If this term is new to you, a non-moral evil is a category of ‘bad thing that happens’ that lacks a moral agent. It has a victim, but not a perpetrator. Natural disasters, diseases, and other calamities that cause suffering.