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May 24, 2009 - The Living of FARRAH FAWCETT

by Father Edward L. Beck, C.P.

I was a Charlie’s Angel’s guy growing up. Like most male teens my age I had that poster of Farrah Fawcett in the red bathing suit adorning my bedroom wall. The teeth, the hair, the rest. And so it was sad indeed to see the video images last week of the hair mostly gone and the smile dimmed by the horrors of cancer and impending death. But she said one thing in her recent documentary that really made me sit up and listen. She said, "I don’t know why God has given me this cancer." Now she didn’t say it in a self-pitying way, but as if she were really looking for an answer. Ryan O’Neal, her longtime lover, wasn’t as judgment free in his assessment of God. He wondered if God was capricious and downright mean. I wondered, Did she really believe that God GAVE her the cancer? I’d say that’s a mean God too. But then, how DO we explain innocent suffering? Obviously, God LET it happen. And He could have prevented it if He’s ALL POWERFUL, right? I don’t have the answers for that, and I take some comfort in knowing we’ve been asking the same theodicy questions for millennia, and not getting satisfying answers. But there’s one answer that I DO depend on: That God doesn’t abandon us in suffering. Just like people haven’t abandoned Farrah. The curls may be gone and the radiant smile no longer, but that indomitable spirit shines through. Despite her travails, she doesn’t seem to have given up on God. And I don’t think God has given up on her either. It may just take the passage to a TRULY angelic state before that Divine embrace can finally be felt. When Charlie’s Angel becomes God’s Angel. And that IS something to smile about.