Father Thomas Welbers' Homily

Last Saturday evening, late Christmas afternoon, while we were busily and peacefully celebrating the birth of Jesus with our families and friends, we were completely unaware of the tragedy that was unfolding half a world away. The count of lives quickly snuffed out is rapidly approaching 150,000. And the ravages of disease and hunger are just beginning to be felt, likely to bring the toll to a quarter of a million or more. Worldwide relief efforts have been quick and massive and generous, and are continuing – but they are never enough. Any and all relief, as important and necessary as it is, never does more than just touch the surface of such a tragedy. The broken heart of immense suffering always remains.

As Christians, enlivened and enlightened by faith, we still ask why. If God is all powerful, why doesn’t he protect his children from such needless and tragic suffering and death? As Christians, we’ve heard many answers to this question, probably even given our own answers in an effort to comfort people grieving tragedy and loss. All the answers we may give, whether they focus on the fallibility, uncertainty and sinfulness of our human condition, or on our failures to harmonize our lives with the laws of nature, or even on the call to follow Jesus in carrying his cross – all these answers fall short of satisfying our need to make sense of such suffering and tragedy.

The problem of pain and death, especially of children and innocents, has caused many lose their faith and to deny that there is ultimately any meaning or hope to life. Some can rationalize pain in the abstract, without experiencing it, and then come to a whole different understanding when the pain and loss actually does become part of their own life.

The great English writer and theologian, C.S. Lewis, was an example of this. As a convert to Christianity from atheism, he wrote many popular books explaining difficult issues of faith and theology in terms that appealed to many peoples’ thirst for understanding. In one of his early books, The Problem of Pain, he indicated that his move from atheism to Christianity had elevated his ability to accept life’s tragedies. Of course, he was living a single, and relatively comfortable and untroubled life as a university professor when he wrote this. Lewis tried to resolve the contradiction between a suffering world and a God that is good by asserting that God’s idea of goodness is different from our own various ideas of goodness. God wants our ultimate good, and we often are preoccupied with lesser things. We want God to give us what we want, while God wants to change us, to make us wholly and truly lovable in his eyes. We are creatures who suffer because we are in need of change.

Intellectually, that argument works, perhaps. It has a ring of truth, and it points to the ultimate purpose and goal of human life. Intellectually, the argument even is able to affirm God’s unconditional love for us and integrate pain and suffering into that notion. But our heart, our gut, still isn’t satisfied, is it? C.S. Lewis found this out, too.

Late in life, many years after writing The Problem of Pain, Lewis discovered the love that had eluded him for so long in the person of Joy Davidman, to whom he married and gave himself completely in a vibrant and fulfilling marriage, that was tragically cut short by her cancer. The story was eloquently told in the movie of some years back, Shadowlands. Two years before his own death, Lewis fell into despair and nearly lost his faith.

Before his wife died, Lewis viewed suffering much like most of us do – detached, vicarious, “it happens to somebody else,” on the evening news. We watch it and theorize about what possible use suffering could have or why it persists and what we should do about it. We toss out answers, some of them convincing but none of them fully satisfying.

We remain fascinated by calamity, our eyes glued to the electronic or print images. We slow down to view car wrecks, both repelled and spellbound by human suffering. Deep down, repressed, there is that fear, “Will it happen to me?”

With the death of his wife, Lewis was transformed from a spectator of suffering to someone crushed by despair. In his book, A Grief Observed, he was no longer talking about doctrine in the abstract. Grief overwhelmed him. He still believed in God, but he “was in danger of coming to believe such terrible things about him.” God must be a “Cosmic Sadist.” He had not realized this before because only now, with the death of his beloved Joy, had the stakes been raised horribly high.

Pain and death were no longer intellectual exercises for Lewis. They were now gut-wrenching personal experiences. Lewis was losing control of his world.

These experiences of tragedy and suffering remind us of our limited place in the world. Any attempt to fully manage them, especially with words, becomes an impossible task as we try to find meaning through our own effort. We simply must live through it. Ultimately, God is the Creator of our world. We are not.

In a strange and ironic way the problem of pain and suffering shows us that God is beyond whatever we can imagine or construct. God is not a God we can define. We do not begin to understand the ultimate meaning of our condition in this world any more than we can understand the depths of the reality of God. And we kid ourselves when we think we do.

And so try as we can – and it is necessary that we try – we cannot fully or even satisfactorily understand the problem of pain or the death of an innocent. We do not have God’s eyes.

How can we worship such a God? It seems many people can’t. Just as many turned people their backs on Jesus when he spoke the “hard saying” about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Jesus did not run after them saying, “Wait, you misunderstood. I can explain.” Instead he turned to Peter and the remaining disciples, and asked, “Will you too go away?” Peter, speaking for the others said simply, “Lord, to whom shall we go? We have come to believe that you have the words of eternal life.” Confronted with a God and a world that we cannot understand, many turn away; and we who remain can only say with Peter, “Lord, to whom shall we go?”

We just heard in the Gospel concerning the events that surrounded the birth of Jesus, “Mary pondered these things in her heart.” “Pondering” means more than merely “thinking about” or “reflecting.” The word “ponder” comes from a Latin word meaning “weight.” To ponder is carry a weight – not necessary to understand it, just to accept it, and carry it. The sublime yet confusing events of the divine drama she was just beginning to experience – her task was not to understand, but to accept and carry in her heart. And the weight would not be made lighter when at the foot of the cross, she would hear her divine Son cry out with one breath “My God, why have you forsaken me!” and with another, final, breath “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

At the brink of this New Year, already burdened by unspeakable tragedy, we ponder with Mary a weight of human suffering we do not understand. At the brink of this New Year, we can only cry out as St. Paul says, “Abba! Father!” with no coherent prayer to follow that cry. Surrounded by tragedy and suffering wherever we turn, we are speechless, and dogged by despair and fear. Is there hope?

The one glimmer of hope is the Jesus who stands beside us, who holds out his wounded hands and feet and pierced side for us to ponder, and who says only “Fear not. I have been there before you.” Is that enough for us?

© 2004 Thomas Welbers

Note: A major inspiration for this homily was an emailed article, entitled "A Grief Observed," which I received on New Year's Eve afternoon from www.tothesource.org. I borrowed the theme and basic direction (as well as the C.S. Lewis information) from the article, but drew it to a slightly different conclusion.

This idea of "ponder" as "carrying tension so as to transform it" is a wonderful insight from Fr. Ron Rolheiser. See his articles, "When Doing Nothing Is Enough" , "Amazement as Blocking Compassion" , "A Culture of Amazement" , and "On Carrying a Scandal Biblically."