Where was God When Boston was Bombed?

It is You Jesus, stretched out on the cross, who gives me strength and are always close to the suffering soul. Creatures will abandon a person in his suffering, but You, O Lord, are faithful...--St. Faustina

(Gospel text: Jn 6:35-40)

Jesus said to the crowds,
“I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.
But I told you that although you have seen me,
you do not believe.
Everything that the Father gives me will come to me,
and I will not reject anyone who comes to me,
because I came down from heaven not to do my own will
but the will of the one who sent me.
And this is the will of the one who sent me,
that I should not lose anything of what he gave me,
but that I should raise it on the last day.
For this is the will of my Father,
that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him
may have eternal life,
and I shall raise him on the last day.”

Where is God in the midst of the Boston Marathon horror? 

Just where he always is, in the midst of the mess. He's there suffering with the victims, bearing the horror with us and weeping with those who mourn and raging with those who rage.

Do you feel righteous rage at the insanity and senselessness of this evil? So does God. Now you understand what God's wrath is like. God's anger is not arbitrary or petty. He is angry when something beautiful is broken and when something innocent is devoured by evil.

Do you feel helpless sorrow, pity and nameless frustration in the face of such terror? So does God. Now you understand his frustration and anger at humanity's inhumanity.

Do you feel compassion and heartache, and don't you want to do something for the people who are hurting? So does God. Now you know how much he longs to come in to our lives and help us and do something for us to heal and reconcile and make things right.

Don't you feel rage and frustration and confusion and fear for the deranged and sick person who planned and perpetrated the outrage? Don't you ask what made him do such a thing? What turned the nameless bomber into a murderous monster?

The fact of the matter is that God is in the middle of all the emotions, in the middle of the mess with us.

Why doesn't he step in and stop the evil? Because he's God and he created our race with free will. He allows us to do what we will. He does not impose his will on us even when he sees what horrors we have planned.

He did not deliver his own son from torture and death, but instead brought out of that darkness a new light for mankind. That's how he handles it. He works endlessly and eternally to bring good out of evil, to bring light out of darkness, to bring life out of death and hope out of despair.

This creative work of his is something he calls us to share in. We can choose to cooperate or we can choose to refuse. He has given the Catholic Church the Sacrament of Reconciliation, to somehow fashion out of the horror hope. This gift is for everyone, no one is excluded. The only people who are excluded are those who exclude themselves.

You may ask yourself, where did the evil come from in the first place? You can't blame it on religion. For every deranged and twisted religious maniac there are a thousand sincere, good and moral religious people.

You can't blame it on politics. There are plenty of people who use politics to help heal the world and mend our broken society.

All we can do is admit that someone somewhere is very broken and twisted, wounded and full of rage. Furthermore, we must also admit that our whole society is broken. Our world is broken.

Our world is locked in a cycle of selfishness, greed, lust and violence. What I'm getting at is this: our Western society is sick, sick through and through with an insidious cancer. Just beneath the smiling surface of America there is a cancer of sin, and the symptom of this sickness is violence.

I am just as horrified as the next person at the senseless bombing in Boston, and I truly hope I am wrong, but I predict more of the same. This bombing came out of some dark place in our world and our American society shares in this darkness just like the rest of the world.

The dark wound is deep down in our culture, and it will continue to poke out its monstrous head and ravage our land whenever it gets the chance. This violence and the other recent violence has burst forth from our whole collective human race.

Even if the Boston bomber is a foreigner, the person who planned the bomb is our son. He is our offspring. We produced him. Beneath the surface, our society is deeply unhealthy, and unless something is done to correct that sickness, the cycle of violence will continue.