[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 51 (Friday, April 8, 2011)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E682-E684]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 FINDING GOD IN THE MIDST OF SUFFERING

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Friday, April 8, 2011

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I submit the New York Times obituary of 
William J. Stuntz, an influential legal scholar, who died last week 
after a 3-year battle with metastatic colon cancer. He was 52.
  I also submit a piece which Mr. Stuntz authored in 2009 for 
Christianity Today titled ``Three Gifts for Hard Times.'' Christianity 
Today re-ran the piece this month in honor of Stuntz's passing. In the 
face of great personal hardship, including chronic pain which plagued 
him for more than ten years, Mr. Stuntz found tremendous strength in 
his Christian faith, and wrote of it in ways both compelling and 
poetic. I commend it to my colleagues.

[[Page E683]]

                  [From Christianity Today, Aug. 2009]

                       Three Gifts for Hard Times

                         (By William J. Stuntz)

       Survivors of some horrible plague or battle often find 
     themselves wracked with guilt: Why did I live while so many 
     died? Though I had no battle scars, I used to feel a similar 
     sense of guilt. I married the only woman I've ever loved. We 
     have three terrific children. I have a secure job that I love 
     and that pays well. Sometimes I would ask God: Why have you 
     been so kind to me? Why have I gotten such an easy life?
       I don't ask those questions anymore.
       A little over nine years ago, while driving home from a 
     family vacation, my car got a flat tire. When I started to 
     change it, something nasty happened at the base of my back. 
     Ever since, my lower back and the top half of my right leg 
     have hurt. After two operations, dozens of injections, 
     physical therapy, psychotherapy, and thousands of pills, my 
     back and right leg hurt every waking moment, and most of 
     those moments, they hurt a lot. Living with chronic pain is 
     like having an alarm clock taped to your ear with the volume 
     turned up--and you can't turn it down. You can't run from it; 
     the pain goes where you go and stays where you stay. Chronic 
     pain is the unwelcome guest who will not leave when the party 
     is over.
       A few months after my back turned south, my family and I 
     moved when I accepted a job at Harvard Law School. Our family 
     began to unravel. One of our children suffered a life-
     threatening disease, and my marriage fell apart.
       Those crises faded with time but left deep scars. Early 
     last year, in February 2008, another piece of bad news struck 
     me: Doctors found a large tumor in my colon; a month later, 
     films turned up tumors in both of my lungs. In the past year, 
     I've had two cancer surgeries and six months of intensive 
     chemotherapy. I've been off chemo for a few months, but I'm 
     still nauseous much of the time and exhausted most of the 
     time. Cancer kills, but cancer treatment takes a large bite 
     out of one's pre-diseased life, as though one were dying in 
     stages. Some of that stolen life returns when the treatment 
     stops. But only some.
       Today, my back and especially my right leg hurt as much as 
     they ever have, and the odds are overwhelming that they will 
     hurt for as long as this life lasts. Cancer will very 
     probably kill me within the next two years. I'm 50 years old.
       Such stories are common, yet widely misunderstood. Two 
     misunderstandings are worth noting here. First, illness does 
     not beget virtue. Cancer and chronic pain make me sick; they 
     don't make me good. I am who I was, only more diseased. 
     Second, though I deserve every bad thing that has ever 
     happened to me, those things didn't happen because I deserve 
     them. Life in a fallen world is more arbitrary than that. 
     Plenty of people deserve better from life than I do, but get 
     much worse. Some deserve worse and get much better. Something 
     important follows: The question we are most prone to ask when 
     hardship strikes--why me?--makes no sense. That question 
     presupposes that pain, disease, and death are distributed 
     according to moral merit. They aren't. We live in a world in 
     which innocent children starve while moral monsters prosper. 
     We may see justice in the next life, but we see little of it 
     in this one.
       Thankfully, God gives better and more surprising gifts to 
     those living in hard times. Three gifts are especially sweet.


                            Redeeming Curses

       First, God usually doesn't remove life's curses. Instead, 
     he redeems them.
       Joseph's story makes this point. Joseph was victimized by 
     two horrible injustices: one at the hands of his brothers who 
     sold him into slavery, the other thanks to Potiphar's wife, 
     who falsely accused him of attempted rape. God did not undo 
     these injustices; they remained real and awful. Instead, God 
     used those wrongs to prevent a much worse one: mass 
     starvation. When Joseph later met with his brothers, he said 
     this about the transaction that started the train rolling: 
     ``You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.'' That 
     doesn't mean that slavery and unjust imprisonment are good; 
     rather, the point is that they produced good, and the good 
     they produced was larger than the wickedness that was visited 
     upon Joseph. Evil was twisted back on itself, like a gun 
     barrel turned so that it aims at the would-be murderer firing 
     the weapon.
       Joseph's story foreshadows the central story of the 
     Gospels. The worst day in human history was the day of 
     Christ's crucifixion, which saw the worst possible punishment 
     inflicted on the One who, in all history, least deserved it. 
     Two more sunrises and the Son rose: the best day in human 
     history, the day God turned death itself against itself--and 
     because he did so, each one of us has the opportunity to 
     share in death's defeat.
       That is our God's trademark. Down to go up, life from 
     death, beauty from ugliness: the pattern is everywhere.
       That familiar pattern is also a great gift to those who 
     suffer disease and loss--the loss may remain, but good will 
     come from it, and the good will be larger than the suffering 
     it redeems. Our pain is not empty; we do not suffer in vain. 
     When life strikes hard blows, what we do has value. Our God 
     sees it.


                   A change in suffering's character

       The second gift is often missed, because it lives in 
     salvation's shadow.
       Amazing as the greatest of all gifts is, God the Son does 
     more than save sinners. Jesus' life and death also change the 
     character of suffering, give it dignity and weight and even, 
     sometimes, a measure of beauty. Cancer and chronic pain 
     remain ugly things, but the enterprise of living with them is 
     not an ugly thing. God's Son so decreed it when he gave 
     himself up to torture and death.
       Two facts give rise to that conclusion. First, Jesus is 
     beautiful as well as good. Second, suffering is ugly as well 
     as painful. Talk to those who suffer medical conditions like 
     mine and you'll hear this refrain: Even the best-hidden forms 
     of pain and disease have a reality that is almost tactile, as 
     though one could touch or taste them. And those conditions 
     are foul, like the sound of fingernails on a blackboard or 
     the smell of a cornered skunk. Some days, I feel as if I were 
     wearing clothes soaked in sewage.
       Some days--but not most days, thanks to the manner of 
     Jesus' life and death. Imagine Barack Obama putting on a bad 
     suit or Angelina Jolie wearing an ugly dress. The suit 
     wouldn't look bad, and that dress wouldn't be ugly. These are 
     incredibly attractive people whose attractiveness spills over 
     onto their clothing, changing its meaning and the way other 
     people respond to it. If Obama or Jolie wear it, it's a good-
     looking outfit. If they wear it often enough, it becomes a 
     good-looking outfit even when you or I wear it. God's Son did 
     something similar by taking physical pain on his divine yet 
     still-human person. He did not render pain itself beautiful. 
     But his suffering made the enterprise of living with pain and 
     illness larger and better than it had been before. He 
     elevates all he touches. Just as his years of carpentry in 
     Joseph's shop lend dignity and value to all honest work, so 
     too the pain he bore lends dignity and value to every pain-
     filled day human beings live.
       The Shawshank Redemption is about a prisoner convicted of a 
     murder he didn't commit. That prisoner escapes by crawling 
     through a sewer line until he's outside the prison's walls. 
     The narrator describes the transaction this way: ``He crawled 
     through a river of [dung] and came out clean on the other 
     side.'' God the Son did that, and he did it for the likes of 
     me--so that I, too, and many more like me, might come out 
     clean on the other side. That truth doesn't just change my 
     life after after I die. It changes my life here, now.


                         The God Who Remembers

       The third gift is the most remarkable. Our God remembers 
     even his most forgettable children. But that memory is not 
     the dry, lifeless thing we feel when one or another old 
     friend comes to mind. More like the passion one feels at the 
     sight of a lover. When Jesus was dying, one of the two 
     convicts crucified with him said this: ``Jesus, remember me 
     when you come into your kingdom'' (Luke 23:42). Jesus 
     responded by telling him that he would be in paradise that 
     very day. As we use the word remember, that story sounds off, 
     as though the thief on the cross and the Son of God were 
     talking past each other.
       The story sounds off because to us, remembrance merely 
     means ``recall''--I remember when I connect a student's name 
     to her face, or when I can summon up some fact or the image 
     of some past event. That kind of remembrance is a sterile 
     enterprise, lacking both action and commitment.
       In the Bible, remembrance usually combines two meanings: 
     first, holding the one who is remembered close in the heart, 
     and second, acting on the memory. When God repeatedly tells 
     the people of Israel to remember that he brought them out of 
     Egypt, he is saying much more than ``get your history 
     right.'' A better paraphrase would go like this: ``Remember 
     that I have loved you passionately. Remember that I have 
     acted on that love. Hold tight to that memory, and act on it 
     too.''
       Job understood the concept. Speaking with God about what 
     would follow his own death, Job utters these words: ``You 
     will call and I will answer you; you will long for the 
     creature your hands have made. Surely then you will count my 
     steps but not keep track of my sin'' (14:15-16). Notice how 
     memory and longing are fused. Job longs to be free of his 
     many pains, which occupy his mind like a sea of unwanted 
     memories. God longs for a relationship with Job, and Job 
     knows it: hence, his belief that the Lord of the universe 
     remembers each of his steps. He is the Lover who will not 
     rest until his arms enfold the beloved. To Job, the curses 
     Satan has sent his way are a mighty mountain that cannot be 
     climbed, an enemy army that cannot be beaten. In the shadow 
     of God's love, those curses are at once puny and powerless.
       Philosophers and scientists and law professors (my line of 
     work) are not in the best position to understand the 
     Christian story. Musicians and painters and writers of 
     fiction are much better situated--because the Christian story 
     is a story, not a theory or an argument, and definitely not a 
     moral or legal code. Our faith is, to use C.S. Lewis's apt 
     words, the myth that became fact. Our faith is a painting so 
     captivating that you cannot take your eyes off it. Our faith 
     is a love song so achingly beautiful that you weep each time 
     you hear it. At the center of that true myth, that painting, 
     that song stands a God who does vastly more than remember his 
     image in us. He pursues us as lovers pursue one another. It 
     sounds too good to be true, and yet it is true. So I have 
     found, in the midst of pain and heartache and cancer.

[[Page E684]]

     
                                  ____
                [From the New York Times, Mar. 20, 2011]

          W.J. Stuntz, Who Stimulated Legal Minds, Dies at 52

                          (By Douglas Martin)

       William J. Stuntz, an influential legal scholar known for 
     his counterintuitive insights, who blamed liberal judges, 
     conservative legislators and ambitious prosecutors for what 
     he saw as a criminal justice system that imprisons far too 
     many people, died on Tuesday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He 
     was 52.
       His family announced the death, which followed three years 
     of treatment for metastatic colon cancer.
       Though Mr. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School, 
     advised public officials and wrote often in the popular 
     press, his greatest influence was with legal scholars. After 
     he burst on the scene in the 1980s with a flurry of fresh 
     ideas and interpretations, ``you saw a snowballing of 
     references to him,'' said Daniel C. Richman, a professor at 
     Columbia Law School.
       Justice Elena Kagan of the United States Supreme Court said 
     in an interview Friday that Mr. Stuntz's work was 
     ``impossible to pigeonhole,'' despite his self-professed 
     conservative inclinations.
       ``What was fascinating about him was that everybody read 
     him and listened to him and took seriously what he said,'' 
     said Justice Kagan, who worked with Mr. Stuntz when she was 
     dean of Harvard Law School. Scholars came to call his ideas 
     ``Stuntzian,'' she said.
       Mr. Stuntz looked at criminal law as a collection of 
     ``pathologies,'' beginning with the Supreme Court's decisions 
     to give greater protections to people charged with crimes. 
     State legislatures responded to those rulings with laws that 
     toughened sentencing and defined crime more broadly, leading 
     to more jail time and more arrests, disproportionately 
     affecting the poor and minorities.
       But Mr. Stuntz said the legislatures neglected to 
     appropriate enough money to deal with the added arrests, 
     particularly for public defenders and others paid by the 
     government to defend the indigent. Adding to the focus on the 
     poor, he said, was prosecutors' reluctance to bring to 
     trial people who could afford lawyers and who could employ 
     the new court-ordered constitutional protections.
       Prosecutors then used their discretion to negotiate guilty 
     pleas with public defenders. The prosecutors could sift 
     through the broader array of criminal charges and sentences 
     passed by legislators to make deals, taking many of what Mr. 
     Stuntz called ``easy guilty pleas.''
       One result was the sort of paradox he loved to illuminate. 
     ``Ever since the 1960s, the right has argued that criminal 
     procedure frees too many of the guilty,'' he wrote in The 
     Yale Law Journal in 1997. ``The better criticism may be that 
     it helps to imprison too many of the innocent.''
       Mr. Richman said Mr. Stuntz believed that an equally 
     worrisome problem was that the essential question of guilt or 
     innocence could get lost. For trials of people who can afford 
     lawyers, questions of procedure can supersede substance. Plea 
     deals made by the poor are often just that--deals--even 
     though the convicted person has to admit guilt.
       Mr. Stuntz wrote for newspapers and magazines on issues 
     beyond the law. In an article in The New Republic in 2006, he 
     raised liberal eyebrows by saying that government could be 
     more effective in fighting terrorism if it were less 
     transparent and more concerned with protecting its own 
     privacy than that of its citizens.
       Carol Steiker, a Harvard law professor, said Mr. Stuntz was 
     not only ``considerably to the right of your average Harvard 
     law professor'' but also unusual at the university because he 
     was an evangelical Christian. She said he had begun to use 
     the word ``mercy'' among the ``values he thought the criminal 
     justice system should have, but didn't.''
       Even when applying Christian principles, he had surprises. 
     In one instance he chided Christian conservatives' demand for 
     ``originalism'' in interpreting the Constitution, wondering 
     why they did not regard this as idolatrous. He said their 
     overwhelming identification with one party, the Republicans, 
     had ``poisoned politics in deep ways.''
       William John Stuntz was born in Washington on July 3, 1958, 
     grew up in Annapolis, Md., and graduated from the College of 
     William and Mary and the University of Virginia School of 
     Law. He clerked for Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. and taught at 
     the University of Virginia for 14 years.
       ``He leapt to the top of the field in the early days of his 
     entering the law professor world,''said Martha L. Minow, the 
     current dean of Harvard Law School.
       Harvard hired him in 2000, and in 2006 he was named the 
     Henry J. Friendly professor. This fall, Harvard University 
     Press will publish his book ``The Collapse of American 
     Criminal Justice.'' Also this fall, Cambridge University 
     Press will publish a book of essays on the implications of 
     his scholarship.
       Mr. Stuntz is survived by his wife, Ruth; his children, 
     Sarah Stuntz, Andrew Stuntz and Samuel Cook-Stuntz; his 
     parents, John and Sandy Stuntz; his sister, Linda Adamson; 
     and his brothers, Richard, Michael and David.
       Mr. Stuntz wrote extensively about the chronic pain he 
     suffered after a back injury in 1999, saying he felt better 
     after realizing it was futile to dream of being painless. 
     ``Hopelessness turns out to be surprisingly good medicine,'' 
     he wrote.
       He kept writing when he was dying of cancer, saying that he 
     found hope in a single passage of the Book of Job. ``You will 
     call and I will answer,'' Job says. ``You will long for the 
     creature your hands have made.''
       Mr. Stuntz wrote, ``The concept that God longs for the 
     likes of me is so unbelievably sweet.''

                          ____________________