Since the Garden of Eden men have grappled with the Problem of Evil.
Why would an all-good, holy, just and benevolent Father-Creator engender billions of souls knowing that a great number - almost all by some Saints' estimation - would be eternally damned?
And how can we love such a God?
Isn't this the epitome of cruelty?
And look at the great servants and saints of God - hated, unjustly punished, persecuted, tortured, maligned, condemned, martyred.
If this is how God allows His friends to be treated, no wonder He has so few!
Lastly, even Christ Who commanded legions of powerful angels set such power aside to be abused at the hands of men and in the spirit of Satanic cruelty.
In our own lives we experience tragedy, abandonment, betrayal, rejection, are ostracized if we take a stand - however minor - for a just cause or for sacrality.
Even those who are religious are often told their religion is lukewarm, formalist, empty of true supernatural faith, unworthy of any favor or attention from the Most High God.
Everywhere we look we see this cruelty, this injustice, this chaos and perturbation. Often it follows us into our sleep where we are tormented by nightmares and anxious fears, even safely in our beds.
Why?
Where is the God Who is love?
I don't know the answer.
That is the dark reality of the problem of evil.
It is a mystery, and we are not given to know why God allows evil to prosper, souls to perish, eternity to be engulfed in tormenting flames for an uncountable number of them.
The standard answers are that God allows evil so that good may come from it, and that He made man free so that man could choose the good over the evil without coercion.
This culminates at Golgotha where the most horrific evil conceivable - Deicide - the malicious torture and murder of God - takes place in the holiest city on earth and at the hands of its priests.
Theologians, philosophers and mystics have in their own turn explained the great mystery of eternal salvation through the offering of Christ as divine Victim who propitiates the wrath of God - not for Himself, but for us sinners.
The mangled body on the tree belongs to the Creator.
It is He Who hangs there between heaven and earth, blood surging from His hands and feet, in agony twisting to breathe and endure both the physical torments and the humiliating contempt of His own people.
There is no other way to overcome evil we are told.
We must appropriate this sacrifice personally, to our own souls by our own free will.
We must own the God-Man, condemned by the Jews, crucified by the Romans, abandoned by all but a tiny handful after He had spent His brief yet full life doing only good to the helpless.
I do not understand any of this.
The problem of evil is NOT resolved for me by this mystery.
But there is even for my brute ignorance, something marvelous and all-encompassing about the Galilean impaled during Passover between two capital criminals.
Why, Lord?
Wasn't there some other way?
Didn't You pray, "Abba Father, please let this cup pass from me?"
Stripes and thorns and nails and a spear thrust through your innocent heart - THIS is the way we must trod to be delivered from the consequences of our very real and personal sins?
I totter on the precipice of despair to weigh this moral equation on my utterly corrupt and inadequate conscience.
How can I follow you, Lord? Follow You here?
Here on Golgotha's bloody summit with the Blessed Virgin Mary?
I freely confess I have no answers.
The problem of evil remains. It is strong, convincing, logical, compelling, relentless, concrete, real, and we are all intimate with it.
This Lent I step out into the darkness of my greatest fear - that of eternal damnation - trembling, weak, scandalized, and unsure. I pray for the grace of hope. Only hope can overcome the Tempter's smooth and efficient logic. I cannot attain to any peace in my intellect, yet I know without the gratuitous gift of supernatural hope, I am and will be lost.
Son of David, we both know I deserve hell. Please don't let the enemy win.
I need You.
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