THE facts answer

What Urges Us
to Embrace Hope?
In front of a calamity like the earthquake in Abruzzo, fundamental questions arise–together with a possibility.

by John waters

Events like the calamity in Abruzzo send me back to some essential questions. What does God want from mankind? Why does He allow such things to happen?  
The most seductive theory I have seen is outlined in a 1970s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by an American rabbi, Harold S. Kushner. The author seeks to reconcile his faith with the death of his son, who died at age 14 of progeria—“rapid aging.” Kushner addresses issues raised in the Book of Job about the irreconcilability of the idea that God is, at once, all-powerful and just. His conclusion is startlingly simple: God is all-loving but not all-powerful; the world remains incomplete and imperfect, and no longer within the scope of its Creator. We are here to aid God’s work of completion. God helps in certain ways, but neither causes things to happen nor can prevent them. The bad things that happen are neither punishments nor tests—simply events, and God is entirely innocent.
I don’t know. But I know that catastrophes force me to confront the fundamental choice between meaninglessness and hope. Such events either nudge me toward the despair that lies beyond the last shred of faith in a loving God, or draw me to the solace of Fr. Giussani’s words about sadness being a “fundamental characteristic of a life lived with awareness.”
Giussani tells me that the absence of a correspondence for my desire for a world without pain and loss relates to my sense of an ideal destination, and what I seek is defined by its absence and by my desire. This is what saddens me, as much as my sorrow for the pain of people I do not know but recognize as being like me.
I embrace this or stumble toward the abyss. I have, in support of my renewed searching, a slightly more desperate longing, the witness of those who have been along the way, and the fabric of a life lived in a Christian civilization. I have more: the eye-contact of those who urge me back from the abyss of unhope. I cannot describe what I see in them—not a zealous evangelicalism, but something softer. I can convey it more readily by noting its absence in others, who seem more tired somehow; more bored, impatient. I am moved to tears by something I cannot name. 
A friend e-mailed me recently about her experience of hearing Fr. Carròn speaking at the CL Spiritual Exercises in Rimini, which she called a “heartquake.” Carròn, she wrote,  “highlighted that we do not recognize the Presence not because the Presence is not real, but because our personal humanity is absent. Recognizing that Christianity is an historical event is not enough. If we reduce it to a religion of the Book, we could even kill ourselves. If the Resurrection is not real, we can even possess all of Christ’s words without knowing Him. The event becomes a dead word.”