Primo Levi, Holocaust survivor, called that terrible era "an event without witness." There is a wall between those who suffer greatly and those who seek to understand that suffering, but cannot. It is one of the great tragedies that when we lose a loved one, especially one lost to suicide, that it is impossible to truly know another person's pain.
So how do we find God amid such things? Some have suggested that suffering on the scale of the Holocaust, of the Rwandan genocide, of all such truly dreadful acts of evil, are events that mean we can no longer bear witness to a God who loves. They mark the death of that sort of God. Perhaps the death of God altogether.
Yet, the message of Good Friday is that pain and loss and destruction somehow make their dwelling at the very heart of God. The One whom we call Love, Light, the Beloved now suffers. The Creator faces annihilation, the very contradiction of the first words of Genesis, "In the beginning, God created..."
In Elie Wiesel's Night, the account is relayed of a child who is hanged while the other prisoners are made to watch. "Where is God?" one of the prisoners asks as they watch the young boy struggle in awful torment. "He is there," Wiesel hears a voice well up inside of him, "hanging on the gallows."
Today is a day when a way lies open for us to dwell with the thought that somehow, in the great mystery of the Incarnation, God dwells in solidarity with those who suffer. God abides with those who abide at the corner of death. If nothing else, when we look at the cross, we know that in our darkest hour we are not alone.
May you take comfort in that hope, and may we all pray for the day when God's peace will reign upon the earth.
Peace,
