A Note to the Reader
This essay wrestles with suffering, trauma, death, faith and the presence of God. It is not an attempt to explain another person’s suffering or to insist that pain must have a purpose.
It is my own theological reflection on a question I have struggled with personally:
Where is God when life is both beautiful and terrible?
Some readers may find these themes emotionally or spiritually difficult. Read slowly. Step away if you need to. You do not have to agree with my conclusions, and you do not have to find meaning in suffering before you are ready—or at all.
The argument that follows rests on an important distinction: God’s presence is not the same as God’s authorship. To encounter God in suffering is not to call the suffering good.
I have seen beautiful families built after abortions that left people wondering whether they would ever feel whole again. I have also watched people do everything they were told was right—pray faithfully, marry sacramentally, work honestly, raise children carefully, pursue education, obey the rules—and watch the architecture of their lives collapse anyway.
We do not like these stories beside one another.
The Bargain
Religion is easier when life behaves according to sequence: obedience, blessing; transgression, consequence; prayer, answer; suffering, redemption. We prefer a God whose movements can be anticipated because predictability gives us the illusion of control. If righteousness reliably produces prosperity, perhaps catastrophe can be kept away by becoming sufficiently righteous.
The bargain is ancient: do this and receive that.
Pray this prayer. Complete this sacrament. Earn this degree. Enter this vocation. Marry correctly. Believe correctly. Avoid these sins. Raise your children this way. Find the right church, the right spiritual director, the right theology. Assemble the correct inputs and wait for heaven to produce the desired output.
But life keeps violating the formula.
The righteous become sick. The dishonest prosper. Marriages blessed before altars disintegrate. Children die despite rooms full of people praying for them. People survive decisions they believed would destroy them and later build lives of astonishing beauty. Institutions created to protect the vulnerable sometimes become the places where vulnerability is exploited.
The problem may not be God. The problem may be the bargain.
God is not a process, a pedigree or a program to which we apply. God is not an equation whose variables we manipulate until Providence yields the answer we requested. God is not a catechism. A catechism may teach us about God. Sacraments may orient us toward God. Scripture may reveal God. Institutions may preserve wisdom about God.
None possesses God.
That is why I have become suspicious of a phrase I once found comforting: God is greater than the highs and the lows.
Certainly.
But greater can become another word for distant. It can place God safely above the blood and mud of human existence, receiving our gratitude for the beautiful things while remaining curiously insulated from the terrible ones.
I have lived too much life to believe in so sanitary a God.
Holiness and Horror
Travel long enough and eventually you discover that holiness and horror are capable of sharing an address.
I have not merely heard stories of trafficking, exploitation, abuse, abandonment and betrayal. I have cared for people carrying those histories in their bodies. I have treated them. I have listened when the clinical questions ended and the human story began. I have participated, however briefly or imperfectly, in their healing.
Nursing has given me an intimacy with suffering that statistics cannot provide: the privilege of entering another person’s life at the strange intersection where biology, memory, fear, family, faith and survival meet.
Some were harmed by strangers. Others were harmed by people they loved. Some were harmed by the very communities they trusted to protect them, educate them or teach them about God.
Once you have sat close enough to suffering, sanitized theology becomes difficult to tolerate.
I have watched institutions speak eloquently about human dignity while people beneath their roofs wounded one another. I received part of my education in Flint while an American city became internationally synonymous with contaminated water. I have lived in a country that offered me extraordinary opportunity while watching immigrants and people perceived as outsiders repeatedly transformed from human beings into political abstractions.
These contradictions are not exceptions to the human story.
They are the human story.
Mexico gave the Christian imagination Our Lady of Guadalupe. For nearly five centuries, the image of a brown Virgin appearing to an Indigenous man has carried extraordinary religious and cultural meaning across the Americas.
Mexico also gave the Catholic Church Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ.
For decades, Maciel moved through the Church surrounded by prestige, access and religious authority. Eventually, the institution that had elevated him had to acknowledge the devastation associated with him. The Holy See described his conduct as gravely immoral and acknowledged a system in which obedience and silence helped protect a charismatic founder while those who challenged him could be marginalized.
Guadalupe and Maciel belong to the history of the same country.
Peru offers an equally uncomfortable juxtaposition. Peru gave Christianity Rose of Lima, the first canonized saint born in the Americas; Martin de Porres, remembered for tending the sick and poor across the racial boundaries of colonial Lima; and saints such as Turibius of Mogrovejo, Francis Solano and John Macías.
Peru also gave rise to the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae.
Its founder, Luis Fernando Figari, was eventually expelled amid grave allegations of physical, psychological and sexual abuse, including allegations involving minors. After years of investigations and revelations concerning abuse and corruption, the Vatican suppressed the organization.
Eventually came an image more powerful than an ecclesiastical decree: churchmen kneeling before Indigenous people and asking forgiveness.
The institution that had taught generations of people to kneel eventually found itself on its knees.
Both histories remain.
The saints remain saints, and the victims remain victims. Beauty does not erase corruption, and corruption does not retroactively erase every act of beauty. God must somehow be spoken of without lying about either one.
That is where cheap theology fails.
A God present only in Guadalupe but absent from the cries of victims is too small. A God confined to Peru’s canonized saints but nowhere to be found when religious authority becomes abusive is not the God described by the Psalmist.
“If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.”
Psalm 139:8
Presence is not approval. Permission is not command. Evil does not become sacred simply because God does not immediately prevent it.
The more unsettling proposition is that human evil cannot manufacture a territory outside God’s domain. The victim remains there. The perpetrator remains there. The person who speaks remains there. The institution that refuses to listen remains there. The believer who leaves in disgust remains there. The bishop who eventually kneels remains there.
History becomes ugly without God ceasing to be God.
The Dangerous Beatitudes
Perhaps this is why the Beatitudes are more dangerous than the embroidered versions hanging in our homes suggest.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
Matthew 5:4
We have heard the sentence so often that its strangeness has nearly disappeared.
Christ does not say blessed are those who successfully avoided mourning. He does not tell us to construct lives so protected, homogeneous and carefully managed that grief can never enter them.
That matters in a world obsessed with avoiding discomfort. We arrange communities around people who look like us, vote like us, worship like us, earn like us, marry like us and confirm what we already believe. We curate friendships, neighborhoods, churches and social circles until almost everyone belongs to a recognizable category.
Safety slowly becomes sameness, and sameness can masquerade as peace.
Christ does something else.
He crosses boundaries. He eats with people whose reputations precede them. He touches people others refuse to touch. He speaks with women whom respectable society has already categorized. He approaches the sick, the poor, the ritually unclean and the socially inconvenient. He allows himself to be interrupted. He confronts religious authorities and enters homes where his presence becomes scandalous precisely because of who else has been invited.
Christ does not build His ministry around remaining among the safe.
He goes toward the rejected.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 5:10
The persecuted person can therefore be the blessed person. The rejected person can be the righteous person. The person condemned by the community can remain inside the blessing of God.
Institutional rejection and divine rejection are not synonymous.
That distinction matters wherever human beings claim authority over the boundaries of God. Catholic authorities have condemned Freemasonry for centuries. Catholics have condemned Protestants. Protestants have condemned Catholics. Christians have condemned other Christians. Religious institutions have censured, expelled, excommunicated and anathematized. Governments have invoked God while persecuting minorities. Communities have invoked morality while protecting prejudices.
Human beings are remarkably talented at constructing a fence and then placing God’s signature beneath the permit.
What happens when the person we condemned is among those Christ calls blessed?
A collar cannot settle that question. Neither can a ring, a lodge, a title, a degree, a pulpit or an ecclesiastical office.
Jesus offered a less glamorous standard:
“You will know them by their fruits.”
Matthew 7:16
History has a way of eventually inspecting the orchard.
The God We Made Polite
Perhaps one reason we struggle with these contradictions is that we have edited God.
We like the Christ who blesses children, heals the sick and forgives sinners, but become uncomfortable with the Christ who overturns tables, condemns hypocrisy, calls religious leaders whitewashed tombs and even curses a fruitless tree.
Yet Jesus also weeps. He becomes exhausted. He loves. He withdraws. He experiences anguish. He bleeds.
Which one was not God?
The same hands that heal can overturn tables. The same mouth that speaks forgiveness can pronounce judgment.
This does not sanctify every human temper—cruelty does not become righteous because we attach Jesus to it—but neither is emotional flatness holiness. There is an anger born when love encounters something intolerable.
Christ was peaceful.
Christ was not passive.
And eventually, every Christian attempt to understand suffering arrives at a place where politeness is no longer possible.
Calvary.
There Is God
Christianity eventually has to stand beneath the Cross because every comfortable theology becomes inadequate there.
Betrayal is there. Religious politics are there. Government cowardice is there. Torture, humiliation, blood, a mother watching her son die and friends suddenly difficult to find are all there.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Matthew 27:46
If suffering proves God’s absence, Christianity collapses at Golgotha.
Instead, Christianity makes its most audacious claim precisely there.
It points toward a condemned man hanging from an instrument of execution and says:
Not observing safely from heaven.
There.
This does not make torture holy or injustice Providence. It does not mean crucifixion becomes good because resurrection eventually follows it.
It means suffering cannot, by itself, prove God’s absence because Christianity has already placed God inside suffering.
The Cross destroys the convenient division in which God receives the sunrise but not the hurricane, the birth but not the funeral, the wedding but not the divorce, the healing but not the diagnosis.
The Cross will not permit so convenient a God.
But Calvary creates another question, perhaps the hardest one:
If God is there, why does God permit any of this?
The Terrible Gift
The biblical story answers almost immediately with the terrible gift of choice.
Human beings can choose against God and against one another. Love can become possession. Authority can become exploitation. Religion can become control. Sexuality can become violence. Wealth can become greed. Leadership can become domination. Community can become exclusion.
Freedom has consequences, and the cruelest part is that those consequences do not remain with the person who chooses.
A drunk driver makes a choice and another family buries someone. A leader chooses war and children inherit graves. An abuser chooses secrecy and another person may spend decades understanding what happened. An institution chooses its reputation and victims discover that truth can be treated as an inconvenience.
This is where “everything happens for a reason” becomes dangerous theology.
Sometimes something happens because somebody chose terribly. Sometimes because of disease, biology, weather, greed or systems constructed long before we arrived.
Sometimes we simply do not know.
God’s sovereignty does not require us to rename every catastrophe God’s desire. If everything were simply what God wanted, repentance would become meaningless. There would be no reason for prophets to denounce injustice, for Christ to overturn tables or for anyone to be commanded to change.
Human freedom can produce terrible things without human beings ever acquiring the power to dethrone God.
That is the terrible gift: we are free enough to wound one another, free enough to love one another, free enough to walk away and free enough to return.
And knowing that does not necessarily make us less afraid.
The Biology of Fear
People like to say Scripture contains 365 commands not to fear—one for every day of the year.
It does not.
The saying is devotional arithmetic rather than biblical scholarship, and perhaps that is appropriate: even if Scripture contained 365 of them, there would still be a 366th morning when someone wakes terrified.
Fear is older than theology.
It lives in the body. Long before human beings wrote