Suffering makes me think. A close young friend has told me he has been diagnosed with a self-immune sickness that will cause him the stiffening of his joints leading to the loss of all mobility. Very painful. A year ago the eldest son of another close fiend, father himself to two young children, died in a car accident. Such things do happen and we all hear about them daily, but when they touch me personally, they shake my soul. And now the Haiti earthquake. So much poverty and so much destruction. Many have written to me in this very Web, How can God allow such things to happen?

I don’t know. What I do know is that the difference between God ‘allowing’ something to happen and ‘causing’ something to happen has been intended by theologians. It is not in the Bible nor in human reason. God does everything together with us, and if a car reaches its destination, it is God’s doing, and if it crashes against a tree and all die, it is God’s doing. It is not someone else’s ‘doing’ and God’s ‘allowing’ it to happen. Everything is God’s doing. The happy journey as well as the crash. Some religions go to the length of postulating a good god and a bad god to explain the duality of life, but this does not solve the issue either.

Why do we suffer so much? I don’t know. Suffering is a mystery. It is true that it brings us closer to Jesús who died on the cross. But then, why should Jesus die on the cross? Could not the Father just forgive us as the father of the Prodigal Son in the parable Jesus himself told us? The mystery stands. Suffering helps moral growth. Agreed. But I wouldn’t tell that to the people in Haiti. God brings out good out of evil. Right. But he could also bring out good our of good. We shall see it clearly in heaven. By all means, but on earth we don’t see it. Mystery stands.

I’ve read in a theological magazine a consideration that helps somehow without quite solving the problem. We tend to make for us a God with too human traits, familiar, close, whom we can handle and manipulate, we shape such an image and get used to such a concept…, and the Haiti earthquake comes to shake us also and to do away with that image and that concept. We assume an anthropomorphic idea of God, and our familiarity with Jesus may lead us to forget his eternal majesty in the heavens. God is different. God is transcendent. God is the ‘Wholly Other’. And this has to be brought to our mind again and again by the suffering that does not fit into our concept of what God’s goodness, omnipotence, and providence should be according to our understanding. This does not justify suffering, but it does help us to draw a practical conclusion from it. God is beyond our thought. Respect, worship, silence. Mystery is a part of our faith. This is the real earthquake.

A learned rabbi came to King Solomon and told him:

- O pious king! You know well that I have given my whole life to the study of the Torah. Now, please, free me from my neighbour who troubles me. He cries and weeps the whole day. He spoils my study and my sleep and he makes it impossible for me to pray. I confess I at times feel the impulse to go and strangle him. Please, o king, rid me of that curse!

King Solomon looked at him sternly and asked him:

How old are you, rabbi?
- This year I’ll be forty, the number of years Israel was in the desert.
- And in forty years nobody has taught you to ask your neighbour why is he weeping?

(Carlos Allende, Los Cuentos del Rey Salomón, Océano, Barcelona 2006, p. 57)

Among King Solomon’s wives there was a noble Egyptian who lived by herself far from all the others. One night, a servant entered her quarters and found her prostrate before a statue of one of her gods in her land. He told a priest in the Temple about it, and the priest went straight to the King.

- O King! You have married an idol worshipper! She has been found worshipping a black statue last night in your palace.

King Solomon, who was aware of such happenings, called his Egyptian wife and asked her in the presence of the Temple priest:

- Can you tell me what you ask for in your prayers?
- Yes, o King! I ask the heavens to have pity on me and to give happiness and long life to the King.

The King apologised for having woken her up, then he turned to the Temple priest and asked him:

- And what do you ask in your prayers, may I know?

(p. 99)

On a certain occasion, at the edge of the desert on the south, King Solomon reached a crossroads where he sat on a stone waiting for someone to show him the way. After a while a man came by, and the king asked him politely to show him the way.

- Who are you? – asked the man. You say you don’t know the way, but you have reached here alone. So far as I know you could be a robber or a devil.
- I am King Solomon – answered the King. – You have nothing to fear.

The man looked at him in disdain, as Solomon was only dressed in a rough mantle and was not accompanied by any of his courtiers. He had come out for the day in secret.

- Where is your throne and your palace? Your sceptre and your crown? – asked the man. – I’m beginning to think you are a madman. You look like a beggar, rather than our king.

Yet, he did not leave, as curiosity moved him to find out more about the man. King Solomon then asked him:

- What is your trade then if you can tell me.
- I’m a peasant.
- Then where are your fields and your furrows, your plough and  your bullocks?
- I’m here only on my way home, sir.
- Well, so am I.

    (p. 153)

‘The Church today has become for many the main obstacle to their faith. In it we can see only the strife for human power, the mean play of those who want to make official Christianity an absolute principle and so to paralyse the true spirit of Christianity.’

(Joseph Ratzinger quoted in Selecciones de Teología 193, Enero-Marzo 2010, Vol. 49, p. 44)