No one over ten years of age would be terribly surprised by that sort of turn on a dramatic television show.

But Sweets, a psychiatrist whose job it is to support the people who face the most gruesome deaths on a regular basis, is utterly shocked and rattled.

And that interested me even though it was a droll stretch in the script. Because the truth is we are utterly unnerved by the Irony of the Universe. We come unhinged when someone we know has died. “He’s dead? What do you mean?!” we want to know.

Why are we so shocked by death? Why are we so stunned by suffering when it comes, finally knocking on our door? Why does the death of a young man unhinge us when we have lived in the world (in Sweet’s case for a few decades) and seen what the world is made of? Why—when we know there are NO exceptions to the bruising life gives us—do we still think happiness, good endings, and success is some sort of birthright?

I pondered this for a few hours and then it dawned on me: We forget the world is fallen. And it is fallen, all of it…all the time. I don't much like it and apparently I'd rather forget, too, but I keep getting reminders.

Once I had the misfortune of seeing a large hawk pick at a dying, but still-breathing rabbit underneath a juniper to the side of my garage. It was horrifying, but the deed was done and there was nothing I could do except weep as I walked away.

Sometimes, even years later, that image–that most intimate suffering–will pop up unbidden and unwanted while I’m driving or walking or resting. Every time, even now as I write this, I wince in pain.

As a psychotherapist and homeopath, I work with people whose lives are filled with undeserved misery, whose suffering sometimes boggles the mind and keeps me up at night. I have seen enough to know and it should be enough for me to remember what life is really like.

Yet, I’m no different than Dr. Sweets. I forget because I live in America where I can enjoy long periods of relative ease and comfort. I forget that things are fallen when all seems to be going well, the dogs are healthy, my husband is happy, and my family is at peace. I forget because I've been damned lucky.

Up until not too long ago (it embarrasses me to think just how not so long ago that was), I operated under the delusion that somehow everyone else would die, but I would just keep going. And that if I “just did this” or “just avoided that” or “just avoided flying” that somehow my ticket would never get punched. One can get very wrapped up (knotted, really) by this sort of thinking.

I know I’m not the only one, though. I think most of America operates under this delusion and because of it many, many people spend a great deal of their lives anxious—fearful, to be more accurate—and trying desperately yet vainly to control as much of their environment as they can.

Acknowledging the fallen nature of the universe does not mean we stop lamenting suffering, or stop praying for the recovery of a loved one, or ignore injustice or walk away from a wounded animal.

To the contrary.

At least for me, finally coming to terms with the nature of existence and my own mortality has set me free. I no longer have to struggle against the way it is. I no longer worry about “what ifs.” I no longer try to control the things that are uncontrollable. I know that there is little I can do about suffering (though I will never learn to shrug it off) and I accept its inevitability.

What I can do, though, is be truly present to those who are in its grip and I can give more of myself to the things I really can do something about. For instance, the other day my husband and I stopped by a wild bird supply store to pick up some seed. We got to talking with the shopkeeper and we asked her about the sudden disappearance of all the smaller song birds in the area. Where we used to get flocks of robins, finches, titmice, bluebirds and juncos, now we saw absolutely nothing. Not a one in the birdbath. No one on the feeder.

She said, “That’s odd. Maybe you have a predator?” I hadn’t seen anything, but I yielded the possibility. We are, after all, in the foothills of a large mountain and federal land.

The next day while driving home I saw something bizarre: a young hawk standing in front of our house by the edge of the road. I thought it was a hawk, anyway. I stopped the car and the bird looked at me with utter indignation and tried to fly away.

Instead he flopped. His wing was broken. I ran into the house, yelled for my husband to come out with a towel and leather gloves. I said, “Don’t ask, just hurry.”

It was getting dark and I knew if we let him stay there, by morning the coyotes would have found him. Or he would soon die of the pain, an infection or starvation.

We ran after him a little while and finally managed to throw the towel over him. My husband picked him up and we held him in one of the dog crates, covered, until we got in touch with a friend who’s not only a medic but a top-notch expert on raising birds of prey. When we brought the bird to him, he looked at it and exclaimed, “It’s not a hawk. It’s a kestrel. He’s a full grown falcon!”

It was a joyous relief to learn the next day that he’d been handed over to a rehab, Talking Talons, for surgery and hopefully release back into the wild. So, the birds have started returning.

But it is all such a frail thing; it all hangs in so precarious a balance. For them to come back, one kestrel had to be severely wounded.

I am no great mystic. I understand relatively little about how things are the way they are. But I have learned a few things that help me to observe truly and keep my center. The most important one is the simple knowing that if the world is indeed fallen, there was a fall. And if there was a fall, there was a place, a higher place from which it fell. That means that it was created to be quite different than the way it actually is and that it can—and will—be restored to its proper condition, as God intended.

This I do believe—we all, the falcon, the small birds, the Boy on the Train, and all that suffer will one day be redeemed and made new. There will be no balance beam to totter along, no “ironies” of natural law, no struggle to make palatable that which is intrinsically intolerable, no need for philosophical pockets big enough to hold the suffering of the innocent.

One day, the debate will be over. The train will be made to set right on the tracks again. In my mind I hear some of the last words of the last book of the Narnia series when the battles are all over and Lucy, Edmund and Peter stand at the end of all they have known, before all they have ever hoped to know: “Welcome, in the Lion’s name. Come further up and further in!”

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