At first read, I'm afraid Benedict's words strike a tremble in my heart because they sound like reworkings of that stuff about God only giving you the travails he knows you can handle and therefore it's a sign of his wild respect and love when you have a really really difficult life. I wish I could, but I simply cannot see a connection between wanting stability and calm, seeking a place of safety and understanding, and God's love - amid the horrors of the Holocaust or Bosnia or the Sudan... I'd LIKE to, but . . .

Anne,

What you're asking is, in effect, the age-old question of why God, to Whom evil is hateful, would permit evil to exist in this world.

I'm no theologian, but I'm thinking that by letting evil exist in this world, God teaches us what evil is, and provides us with examples of what not to do.

Now, granted, that's pretty rough on the people on whom the evil is done-- whether we're talking about victims of petty theft or awful things like mass murder. But think of them as examples-- by permitting us to make mistakes now, and experiencing the consequences, we avoid worse mistakes later.

Think of all the technological advances the last half-century has seen, Anne, and then imagine police-states along the lines of Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union being invented now instead of 75 or 100 years ago. Bad as they were, they would have likely been unstoppable had they had at their command the technologies we have now. Orwell's ghastly world of 1984 would have come true. But we've "been there, done that" already, and now we don't have to worry about 1984 coming to pass-- we're inoculated against it, as it were.

One last thing-- and I don't know how to say it without seeming to trivialize the suffering of the victims of the Holocaust or of Stalin's gulags or of modern-day horrors like the Sudan-- but if one is a believing Christian, one can comfort oneself with the knowledge that the victims are in a better world.

I think that knowledge would lighten one's heart enough to set aside despair, and to summon the anger needed to destroy the people who put those victims through their awful suffering.

If one is to do God's work, it's not enough to mourn the dead. One must also destroy the monsters in human form who can only murder and enslave.

Anne,

I don't, myself, think God sends us "the travails he knows you can handle." I think the travails are part of this world, and an inevitable part of being human. I think he does help us with the slow work of building our lives, if we ask for help. But our sand-castles can still be swept away by a wave at any moment. (However our "building with God's help" is also moving us towards the World to Come. It's not wasted.)

And the disasters you mention are all the product of evil humans. We have free will, and God is only responsible for those disasters in the sense that he leaves us be free to do what we want. (And it's a pretty safe bet that the perpetrators are not people humbly close to God, and also that if there were a lot more people close to God in the world, there would be a lot fewer of such calamities.)

But nature has "free will" too. You may get a perfect sunny day tomorrow, or you may be killed by a tsunami or a meteorite. And of course, you will for sure die. Is this right? It often seems very wrong.

I hope you won't be offended if I say that I think your whole line of questioning is misguided. Think of it this way: If there is a God, he's so far beyond anything we can imagine that it doesn't even make sense for us to try to figure out what he's up to, or complain about the way things work. He'll just reply, like he did to Job, "Where were you when I created the Universe?"

Everything we know, from what various scriptures tell us, says that God is, by human logic, incomprehensible, even crazy. (Why pick a "chosen people?" Why them? why then, and not sooner? Why send a Galilean carpenter around the year 0? Why the long wait? Or for those of other faiths, why pick this guy Mohammed? Why Joseph Smith? Buddha? Why the heck doesn't God, if he wants something, just DO IT, instead of futzing around with prophets and dreams and burning bushes?)

So I think you are asking the wrong question, one that has had human beings knocking their heads against the wall for thousands of years, without getting any answers. On the other hand lots of people say they do get help and comfort from God, and they usually seem to sidestep the sort of questions you are frustrated by and just move along the path...

The idea is that God gave people free will, and we almost immediately used it for evil. The cost of free will is the fact that we can freely choose to be evil, and most people do, because most people are as proud and stupid as Adam and Eve in the garden buying the snake's flattery. The price of complete peace and good behavior without any effort on the part of humanity (which is what is actually behind the cry of "how can God let people do evil?") is for us to be transformed into mindless robots, or simply die. Dead people don't do evil. Or good. Do you want that comet to strike now?

I call the Pope "Pope Bilbo." I don't know why, but he makes me think of a hobbit, and I have never gotten that forbidding "scary guy" image that other people seem to have formed. Maybe it helps not to be Catholic, I don't know. All my Catholic friends were terrified by The Exorcist but I am afraid I just laughed at it. (However, a rather cheesier horror film, The Sentinel, which had Catholic themes in the plot, was a bit more unnerving.)

John, I am not offended in the least by your saying my "line of questioning is misguided". I'm not sure why "misguided" because I think it's simply that you are in the set of those who believe and I am not. I think the real discussion probably is about faith. In this case, my problem is not with God failing to prevent horrors since I am fully cognizent of free will and its pitfalls, but with the smooth comments that sound glib to me, the ones that those with faith often use to soothe and explain unpreventable horrors. Mothers of brain damaged children are told "it's God's will" and "this suffering will earn your child a higher place in heaven" and "use your suffering to spread God's love". I find such remarks every bit as horrifying and upsetting as the event itself. I suspect the "answer" (if there is one) lies in one's belief (or not) that there is God who is watching over everything and has a plan.

Mothers of brain damaged children are told "it's God's will" and "this suffering will earn your child a higher place in heaven" and "use your suffering to spread God's love".

I have never once heard someone say something like this to a distraught mother. Theologians philosophizing, trying to puzzle out answers, may have theorized such things - and may be correct - but in 2+ years studying for the priesthood, and a lifetime around the church, I've never once heard anyone say such a thing to a distraught mother.

Normally, the words don't make a difference anyway, but the words are, at most, "we can't know," and "you're in my prayers," and "everything is grace," and "what can I do to help?"

Anne,

My personal speculation is that God does not have a script, He has an outline of an improvisatory performance, in which we are the performers. Our job is try to descern His outline, and use our creativity and freedom to move the performance in the direction hinted at....

There is a Catholic concept of "offering" suffering up to God, which I'm still vague on, but I don't think it's anything like what you are suggesting.

Ethan, my experiance as an Episcopalian and being raised a Baptist is the same...

Maybe there's a connection between the religious people one encounters and one's adult faith. At the interview before my first confession (I was 6 years old) I was told the school I was attending did not exist (it was Episcopalian). And when my parents divorced and took my sad and upset 9-year-old brother for help to the parish priest, the priest shouted my parents out of the office and told my brother that they were going to hell. My family was close friends with that of Karen Killilea, a young girl who famously survived and triumphed over cerebral palsy and the venerable Cardinal Spellman himself told her parents in my parents' hearing that "you are so lucky to have this suffering from God because it means he loves you very much and knows you are special". Which is much worse than "just words". Perhaps training is better these days. I hope so.

Would you rather he had told them that her suffering was horrible and that they should be angry at God? You sound to me that you're still angry at your bad childhood experiences. There are stupid people everywhere; priests are no exception, and of course your school existed no matter what some fool said.

To answer your question, Andrea, what I would hope for is acknowledgment of reality (school, suffering, illness, joy, whatever) followed by assistance, if needed, such as comfort. No, I would not want the priest to encourage anger at God, of course. But I do think he could have made room for the anger and then helped Karen's family move on. He could have offered help instead of platitudes. And, by the way, I'm not still angry at them, but I do feel frustrated that most so-called religious people I know are judgmental and critical (excluding readers of "Random Jottings", of course). I wish religion encouraged people to be real and helpful instead of phony and pious.

At one point I started discussing religion with my non-religious cousin, who said I was the first person she'd talked to on the subject who didn't try to shove it down her throat. I also had a friend who told me she'd become an athiest and was surprised because I was the first person who hadn't immediately come back with some variant of "you're going to Hell."

'Cause really, you don't turn people on to religion by being RUDE.