By Tom Anselm

Why is there suffering in the world? That is a question that has been on my mind lately. There seems to be more of it now than at any time I have been alive. But maybe it is just that I am more aware of it. Like young people dying of cancer or accident or by their own hands, and their passing bringing so much sadness, so much loss. Or like the terrible events that are unfolding in Africa and in the Middle East of wanton massacres based on so-called religious mandates. Or plane crashes, or children with terrible illnesses. Or people with debilitating emotional conditions.

There is a saying that everything happens for a reason, and that

is true.   The car crossed the line, the plane’s engines failed, the

cancer was too advanced. But not everything happens for a purpose

—I think. I believe randomness is part of our life patterns.

For example, if the person hit by that bus had just left home one minute earlier… and so on. But what does this have to do with suffering, you might ask?

Well, we who are left to deal with the aftermath of this are in search of a way through it all. Some take this randomness theory and it helps them see that they could do nothing to have avoided their loved one’s terrible circumstance. Others turn to what has been called “God’s Will.” I don’t pretend to understand this, although I believe it exists and is something I pray I am following, even if “I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so” as the monk and philosopher Thomas Merton said in his famous prayer. But sometimes people question how that same God could allow the myriad modes of suffering.

The answer often is because there is “Free Will.” We make our choices freely; nothing is predetermined. But does a child choose to have brain cancer? Does a Christian in Mosul ask to have his family defiled and slaughtered before his very eyes, only moments before he himself is murdered? Can we say that when we left the house that day we chose to cross paths with that garbage truck? As one of our pastors used to say about life… “It’s a mystery.”

And so it is. I don’t, I can’t, propose to solve it here.

But I do know that billions in the world are about to enter into the next few days contemplating the suffering of a man who, if anyone, was one who least deserved to suffer, but still went through horrendous physical, emotional and spiritual pain for all of us, regardless of our religious affiliation, racial make-up, or national identity. And there is some fairly solid historical evidence that this same man ‘beat the rap,’ and came out at the other end into a new and glorious life.

As hard as it may be for those who have cried until they thought they could not shed one more solitary drop, who didn’t know how they were going to pull themselves out of bed that morning, who screamed in frustration at the injustice of their loved one’s passing, who may have justifiably asked ‘why me, why him, why her, why us’… as hard as it is for them to believe in a purpose behind this pain, maybe that improbable, unexplainable, mysterious promise by that man of the end-result of glory may serve to offer them a splinter of solace.

Like I said, I have no solution.

But maybe this glimmer can be a start.

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