Naked on the Golf Course

Don't ask me what nudity and the golf course have in common. I really have no idea. But my 15 year old friend has somehow experienced these two things together. I must really give him credit since he seems to have done so recently and lives in the middle of Montana. Now that's fortitude of the type that one only finds among adolescent males. I'm glad his clothes were nearby.

He has other problems right now, of course. We all do. His other problem is rooted in that oldest of human issues, the problem of evil. It seems that he's abandoned his faith in God because of evil, specifically because of the fact that two young girls he knows were killed by a drunk driver. "Where was God," he demands to know, "when this happened?"

I must admit that this an easy question to ask. Of all the reasons for doubting the existence of a benevolent and powerful God, the old "problem of evil" is certainly the most sympathetic. We've all wondered the same thing. I asked this question long ago and I abandoned God myself. I sought other solutions. The idea of a loving God didn't make sense when I held the hand of my dying mother; it didn't make sense when my wife died in my arms; it doesn't make sense in the suffering of my daughter in her illness.

But giving up on the notion of God poses a new and serious perplexity. We've gotten rid of God, but the evil, the suffering, still exists and we seem to be powerless to do anything about it. We have made ourselves gods, and a pretty sorry excuse for gods we are. There is no God, and hurricanes ravage our coasts, we can't stop that. There is no God and illness strikes down our loved ones, we can't stop that. There is no God and drunk drivers plow into teen aged girls, we can't stop that. Now what? Our suffering is meaningless. Where is our hope?

In order to find our hope, I would suggest that we have to re-examine the question of God. For us to have hope in the face of the evil and misery in the world any deity we seek would have to have suffered for and with us. Only in the Christian tradition do we find such a deity, that is Jesus Christ and "Him crucified." Only in the Christian tradition, and most especially in the Catholic tradition, are we exhorted to join our sufferings to that of our God. In this way, and only in this way, does suffering, does evil, have any meaning whatsoever. In fact, our suffering takes on an infinite meaning.

Without that hope, left to our own devices limited as we are by our faults, we're left as naked as a fifteen year old boy on a Montana golf course in the dead of winter.

Til next time, all the best. Joe