The Silence of God

Deacon Douglas McManaman

One of the most pressing questions people have, young students especially, has to do with the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? And if God exists, how can he allow so much suffering and evil in the world? Questions bearing upon the tragedies that befall the innocent are very puzzling to say the least, and they are downright scandalous for some, to the point where many have simply rejected outright the very notion that a good God exists.

The philosophical resolutions of such questions are certainly interesting and perhaps persuasive to a good number of people, and they usually include the point that human beings have the power of free choice, and when we choose to do things our way instead of God’s way, life begins to fall apart. A more sophisticated response is that God is all powerful and he is supremely and perfectly good, which means that 1) he wills your perfect happiness and 2) has the power to bring about your greatest happiness; hence, whatever God allows to happen to you in your life, he allows ultimately for your greatest happiness.

There is nothing wrong with these arguments per se; they are sound. However, one does not want to be engaging in this kind of discourse when in the presence of someone who is broken by the loss of her own son, or who has been suffering from clinical depression all her life or someone with PTSD as a result of being exposed to the horrors of war or the evils that are around us but hidden from most people, except police officers and undercover agents. It’s much easier to be impressed with certain abstract ideas in the presence of like-minded people far removed from such suffering, but when in the presence of a person who is in deep darkness, suffering in ways that we’ve never experienced, we begin to sense the inadequacies of our neat and tidy solutions. If we were to push them onto our suffering brethren anyways, ignoring our deepest intuition to keep quiet, we’d see firsthand that our answers only increase their feelings of alienation, isolation, and darkness. The only response these situations call for is utter silence. We just need to be present to them in their suffering; for there are no words that can relieve them of their darkness and the pain they have to live with. The only thing that will bring them any sort of consolation is our silent presence, which acknowledges our inability to console them with words, ideas, platitudes, or rational discourse. 

Their suffering is a great mystery; for their lives and all that has happened that plunged them into darkness is in many ways beyond our ability to fully comprehend. It is opaque and larger than ourselves, and our task is to remain quiet and listen, share in their suffering, participate in it, feel it; for the more we feel it, the more we relieve them of their loneliness and sense of abandonment. 

And that is why Good Friday is the ultimate answer to the mystery of suffering. God does not deliver us a series of premises that entail a conclusion that is supposed to satisfy the mind. Rather, God the Son descends among us, joins himself to a human nature and enters into our darkness. The light of the world enters into the darkness of human suffering not because he wants to understand our suffering–God is all knowing, so he does not lack any understanding. Rather, he joins himself to our flesh, our suffering, our human situation, tastes misunderstanding and rejection, becomes the object of death threats and attempts on his life, was rejected by some of his disciples who couldn’t tolerate his claim to be the Bread of Life, and experiences the worst physical suffering, his passion and death, all this in order to be present in silence to the sufferings of each human person, the sufferings we have undergone and are currently undergoing and have yet to undergo in our lives. He who is Life Itself dies in order to be present in our death, that we might find him there. All this so that our suffering will not be an experience of complete and utter desolation and loneliness. We still suffer, but there is a divine presence in that suffering, a Person who is there paying close attention to each one of us. Scripture assures us that this Person, this presence, is even in the very bowels of hell: “If I climb to the heavens you are there, if I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there” (Ps 139, 8). 

I’ve always said to my mental health patients that you accompany Christ in his suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, and he accompanies you in yours–while Peter, James, and John sleep. They cannot stay awake, but you stay awake; for your depression keeps you from the peace of restful slumber. That is your gift to him, and it is the deepest sharing in his passion. Moreover, friendships are based on common qualities, and you have something in common with Christ, namely innocent suffering and mental anguish, and this common factor establishes an identity that is an eternal source of joy.

God is so good that he chooses to taste complete alienation even from himself; for God the Son experiences the anguish of the Father’s silence: Jesus receives no response from God to his anguished prayer to let this cup pass him by (Mk 14, 32-42), and there is no answer to his final words on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Mk 15, 34). And this very lament was uttered centuries earlier by a victim of injustice:  

My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why so far from my call for help, from my cries of anguish? My God, I call by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I have no relief (Ps 22, 2-3).

His words have become Christ’s words, or better yet, they were Christ’s words from the beginning, for God the Son is eternal, embracing all time and place. Like the psalmist, we too keep Christ company when we suffer what he suffered. Nothing but the silence of his presence and ours adequately responds to the mystery of suffering. This alone gives us the strength to trust that our darkness and death are not the final word; the final word will be uttered three days later.