Tapeworms and Hurricanes
A year or so ago in the waiting room of a doctor’s office I picked up one of the entertainment magazines lying around there (much more interesting to me than, say, Golf World) and read an article about Hugh Laurie, the star of the TV show House. I had never seen the show, but I recognized Laurie’s name from a series of P.G. Wodehouse adaptations made some years ago (probably twenty or more) in which he had played Bertie Wooster. He mentioned how much work it was for him in his role as Dr. House to speak consistently with an accurate American accent. I find that ability fascinating, because I can’t imagine being able to do it, so, intrigued, I watched an episode of the show.
Laurie’s American voice seemed perfect—an amazing feat to me—and he’s a very good actor in general, but I was sorry I had watched the show because it ended with a nasty surprise. It involved—as I have since learned most episodes of House do—the medical detective work of a cynical and grouchy doctor named House: a patient exhibits bizarre symptoms, and House and his staff spend the rest of the episode trying to figure out what’s really wrong, which they do, triumphantly, in the end. The problem with this episode was that this patient’s trouble was caused by a very large tapeworm. (If you don’t know what that means and what it involves, feel free to stop reading at this point and google “tapeworm;” I don’t want to make either of us sick by going into the details.)
Staring in horror, and, as noted, very sorry that I had watched the show, I found myself asking why such a loathsome and abominable thing as the tapeworm should exist. An answer came abruptly and clearly to mind: that’s what sin is.
The tapeworm is an all-too-fitting image for the way sin lives within us and eats away at our lives. A novelist including something of that sort into his story would use it in some sort of symbolic way, to impart reality to an idea of evil and corruption. And I think it functions in the same way in the God-created world we live in.
One way of interpreting the world from a Christian point of view is to see it as an unimaginably huge and complex literary work in which everything has meaning. Our loathing for the tapeworm can be attributed to purely physical causes, the same basic thing that causes a mouse to fear a cat, but I think it goes deeper than that. We are creatures who instinctively see meaning everywhere, and I don’t think the meaning is only in our minds. The meaning is really there; the tapeworm is really loathsome: objectively loathsome, ontologically loathsome.
The tapeworm and similar horrors serve as symbols of evil, written into the story of human life to make truth real and present to us, in something like the same way that, for instance, Flannery O’Connor writes a murderer into her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or a dishonest Bible salesman in “Good Country People.”
Because spiritual evil is real, and can lead us to the ultimate ruin of hell, the evil of the world we live in must also be real and capable of doing us real and serious harm, capable of destroying our bodies as spiritual evil can destroy both body and soul. The dangers we face must be real, the choices we make must have the potential for real disaster—otherwise we would not take them seriously. It must be possible for human beings to lose themselves so completely to evil that they become, for instance, sadistic killers, like one who was in the news this week for the vicious murder of a child—otherwise we would not be completely free.
I’ve spent the past few days worrying about Hurricane Gustav (which as of right now appears set to harm people well to the west of us). Compared to the tapeworm a hurricane seems almost benign; it’s magnificent rather than repulsive, even if it can do a lot more damage in a lot less time than a tapeworm. Like a lot of people, I’m fascinated by hurricanes and tornadoes and any sort of extremely powerful natural phenomenon. I would love to be able to experience the heart of a storm like Gustav without being killed. But if it couldn’t kill me, would I really appreciate it? If I could stand and face it with pleasure as I would an ordinary thunderstorm, it would not impress me nearly as much.
The hurricane doesn’t, like a tapeworm, seem evil in itself; it’s made of wind and rain, which are both good things; the problem is that in a hurricane they’re so powerful that they’re destructive. The obvious analogy is to our passions, and we wouldn’t grasp the lesson if the hurricane weren’t capable of enormous destruction. I’d like to think that in an unfallen condition, or a fully redeemed condition—in the next life—we would be able to experience something like a hurricane and really grasp its splendor without being destroyed by it. Similarly, C.S. Lewis and others have speculated that our emotions won’t be less, but rather more, intense and powerful in the next life; our control over them will be a result of their being in harmony with our wills, not of their weakness.
The tapeworm, however, like intrinsic evil, I can’t imagine having any place in heaven.
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