Questions Without Answers

I am beginning a purge of my apartment, slow and seeming without a dent in the clutter. Lots of reasons for "why now?" The idea of moving is settling into my brain. The aftermath of losing my last parent. Maybe other things. All culminating in a need to turn the life page, which includes going through some old life remants.

I bought some albums in which to put items, things from high school and college I still can't let go of-the handout for the 1972 MSU graduation, the entrance song a the Mass, "You've Got a Friend". The announcement of passing the Bar Examination in New York. A letter/announcement and photo from some friends whose son, then 7, and a budding drummer, met Phil Collins.

And some of my "writings", pre-blog age. Sometimes I actually think I was a good writer when I look at my scribblings. This one happens to be somewhat apt, given the train  wreck in LA, a man made disaster, albeit one without evil intention, and the hurricane battering Texas. Why?

It was written in 1999, nearly ten years ago, it stuns me to realize. And yet still that same question.

Chalk it up to news media hype, if you will, but like it or not it remains true--horrible things are happening.  They always have.  They always will, till the end of time. Acts of nature.  Acts of man.  The most recent courtesy of nature is a 7.8 earthquake in Western Turkey. Twelve thousand are known to be dead.  The reporter says that due to inadequate rescue resources many now alive under the rubble of buildings which were badly constructed in the first place, will join the dead.

Then there are the acts of man. Well known to be a spewer of angry platitudes caused by some long ago real or imagined pain inflicted on him, an otherwise impotent Buford Farrow goes to a Jewish Day Camp and tries to kill children with a gun.  Several kids are wounded, one almost fatally, but all have lived.  Of course, he has succeeded in killing their innocence, maybe some souls too. That remains to be seen. 

All this is to be borne with stoicism for after all it is the portion of the first sin. Two creatures (allegorically speaking) disobey. Death enters the world.  Paradise is lost. The Judeo-Christian traditions agree on that. I think. After that, it's every religious man and woman for himself or herself on how to cope with it all.

In the abstract, theological answers bind anxiety. I can only write a little of my own tradition. Christianity says that we have been saved because God became Man and took all our sins on his back, with the Cross. He was nailed to it.  He died. He rose with a promise of eternity with Him if only we take on our own comparatively little crosses and follow Him in His Act of Trust and Faith in God. No matter what we see, no matter what happens in the world, of in our own lives, that is al we are asked to do.  We are asked to be as Job, to love God when the answer to our cry of "WHY?" is "My Ways are not your ways." That all we are asked to do? The person under the rubble, the shot child reaching for the paramedics on the stretcher, the psychiatric patient battling schizophrenia, the endlesly lonely, it is indeed a demand for ALL, in the face of apparent absolute abandonment. I remember an old priest I once knew, Fr. Skiffington, who, after a number of medical problems ended up in a nursing home. He asked why he had been abandoned. He looked forsaken. this was a believer. A holy man. A Jesuit trained in the Faith. We are creatures, weak, in need of proofs, beset on all sides by ourselves, by our environment, and by knowledge of our certain death, and yet God asks that we have the faith of His So. How can He ask this of us? His Son was fully Man, but He also was fully God Himself. Is that not a huge advantage over us?

I just asked God if it's ok that I wrote all this.  I am not being facetious when I note that I am afraid of the answer. I try to remember that also in my faith it is said that God loves us unconditionally. I hope that at least, is true. Maybe sometimes it's better not to ask any questions.