God in the Dock: When Bad Things Happen to Good People

I hear often from readers who struggle with a midlife crisis of faith. I have even had one of my own. Drifting from faith only disarms you from your one true defense.

March 8, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: In the image above Simon of Cyrene considers “Bearing the Cross,” by 19th Century German artist Ludwig Thiersch. (Plate 147 in The Great Painter’s Gospel).

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In 1982, the year of my priesthood ordination, Rabbi Harold Kushner caused a stir in the publishing world with his classic book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Rabbi Kushner addressed the question of the ages. Why does a benevolent, omnipotent God allow innocent people to suffer? The book was an instant bestseller. Our quest to answer that question has sent humanity down some strange and destructive side roads.

On October 21, 2021, we posted a title that alarmed the majority of our readers who saw it. It was, “The ‘Woke’ Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education.” Actually, I think it was the top graphic that shocked some but not quite enough into getting to the voting polls last November. A radically “woke” segment of our society has captured much of the news and social media and is rapidly moving to the center of social consciousness to become the new normal. The assault on gender and gender identity is its most obvious battleground. The assault on God, and life itself, is at its center.

The latest example comes, sadly, from Kamala Harris. In a recent speech she quoted from one of the nation’s foundational documents saying, “The Declaration of Independence guarantees the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” For the Vice President of the United States to edit the Right to Life out of the Declaration of Independence is the height of hubris.

I wrote of the fallout from this trend in “Disney’ s Disenchanted Kingdom Versus Parental Rights.” Thousands of readers have since viewed the 50-minute Catholic League documentary, “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom.” Many have told me that it is an eye-opener. The heart of its message is that the Disney franchise has openly endorsed and promoted the indoctrination of young children on sexual identity and transgender issues — a trend forced upon us sparking Florida’s new parental rights law.

Ironically, our publisher went to link to the Catholic League documentary last month only to learn that YouTube restricted it from viewers under age 18. The hypocrisy of that is staggering. Fortunately, the Catholic League quickly found an alternative for viewing the landmark film so the link above is valid.

This seemingly political battle is a spiritual battle as well, and its second battleground is a conscious and deliberate intent to remove God from the public square in which we live. I was recently struck by some of the subtle rhetoric in network news coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Several news commentators expressed sentiments that Queen Elizabeth “is in our thoughts.” You might not think that strange, but it was a sentiment that seemed to take great pains to omit that she was also in our prayers.

This subtle restraint on language and content that acknowledges God is most visibly growing in education which sadly has become the indoctrination of the young to woke ideas. Actually, it is even worse than that. References to God or to any of the tenets of Judeo-Christian faith are not only discouraged, but actively suppressed. In a September, 2021 post, “The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner.” I told the story of the Prophet Jonah. After it was published, a reader sent me this humorous exchange between a second-grade student and his teacher. The teacher had been talking about the anatomy of whales:

Boy raising hand: “The Prophet Jonah was swallowed by a whale.”

Teacher: “Actually, Joseph, that is not possible. A whale could not swallow a man.”

Boy: “But it happened to Jonah. I read it in my Bible.”

Teacher: “Do you believe everything you read in the Bible?”

Boy: “Well... yes. God told the story.”

Teacher: “Well, it never happened.”

Boy: “When I go to Heaven I will ask Jonah if it is true.”

Teacher: “What if Jonah isn't in Heaven?”

Boy: “Then YOU can ask him.”

Actually, I liked my own ending of that story better. Once Jonah was coughed up by the giant fish in the parable, he could never sell it at market. There was no longer any prophet in it.

Photo | APK

God in the Dock

There are several accepted meanings of the word, “dock” in modern English. As a verb, it is a nautical term that means to tie off a boat at a pier or station that is also called a dock. It comes from an archaic Dutch word, “doken” which originally meant to submerge under water. There is an even more obsolete usage from the Flemish term, “docke” which refers to a place from which a defendant testifies before a judge. There are those in this culture who are hell-bent on placing God in that dock. It is human arrogance to even imagine that we could ever serve on a jury of God’s peers.

There is a third rail in our spiritual battleground that is manifested not so much in the denial of God, but in the blaming of God. It’s easy to refute or ignore God from a secure place of privilege. This is why some of the disenfranchised poor often seem to have greater faith than the entitled wealthy. They have more practice calling upon God in the absence of their own resources. The poor tend to be more attuned to the limits of human nature. Spiritual enrichment is often — but not always — in inverse proportion to material wealth.

As I set out to write this post about challenges to faith in the midst of suffering and loss, I received a moving and humbling account from a reader. It centers around a tragedy that took place in a New Hampshire Catholic parish. Sheila, a faithful parishioner, lost her 23-year-old daughter, Mary. In a high-profile case, Mary was murdered by a deeply troubled former boyfriend. Sheila’s 20-year-old son previously died from a cardiac abnormality, and her husband died in his 40s from the same illness.

How does someone cope with such a cascade of traumatizing loss? The account to follow is a moving excerpt from a eulogy letter that Sheila wrote and read after the Mass of Christian Burial for her daughter, Mary:

“Hail Mary, full of grace... Holy Mary... In ‘The Hail, Holy Queen,’ I resonate with the title of our Lady as ‘Mother of Mercy,’ as well as ‘to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this Valley of Tears.’ I believe most of us, if not all of us, at one time or another have cried these tears in small or large amounts. In the Prayer to St. Michael, we are reminded of ‘The wickedness and snares of the devil.’

“As we live in these times, we continue to witness these valleys of tears and the wickedness and snares of the devil here on Earth within our lives. How does one find peace amongst all this turmoil? We may find it within the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer Jesus has given to us directly: ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’

“If we are to find peace within ourselves, we must allow God to be one with us. He dwells within us, but we need to be in His graces to find true peace. There is no hate within God. He is pure love. Forgiveness is what He speaks of in the Lord’s Prayer. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

“If I am to carry hate within me, and hold onto these thoughts of anger, how can I be able to pray for my daughter’s soul? I cannot expect God to hear my truest prayers for my daughter, Mary, if I am holding on to anger and hate within me. I want her soul to be swiftly received by our Lord, and to find her Eternal Peace with God the Almighty who is Eternal.

“We are sometimes given crosses that we see as a burden and filled with sorrow. We turn our backs to our Lord Jesus Christ and become angry and curse Him. Perhaps we do not realize what we have been given, what we are allowing ourselves to let go of. It’s His Love. We need to offer all this pain and suffering to our Lord through our Lady, Mary, His Mother. When we do that, we will receive 100-fold of graces.”

My heart also struggled with Sheila’s losses, and I pray that the Lord will ease her trials. We are summoned by such accounts to emulate Simon of Cyrene. We pray for Sheila while aware that we are united in the fellowship of the poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. If privilege and entitlement stand in the way of our feeling such things, and praying such prayers, then we are pitiful indeed.

Prophetic Witness

My seminary years were spent in the awful 1970s at St. Mary Seminary & University in Baltimore, Maryland. While there, I learned first and foremost that no priest ever has a vocation to the seminary. There were always those for whom seminary life was not a means to an end, but a safe haven that was an end in itself. For some, leaving seminary to be thrust into priesthood was traumatic, like being raised out of the womb for the first time. None of us were ever prepared for the “Priests in Crisis” I described in a recent Catholic University of America study.

Perhaps the last few decades of “priesthood in the dock” have, if nothing else, grounded us in humility. There is an element in our Church that would look upon Sheila’s painful cross, and our friend Pornchai Moontri’s crushing life story, with something less than “there, but for the Grace of God, go I.” Simon of Cyrene never stopped to ask what Jesus did to deserve the Cross thrust upon Him. Simon just silently carried it, and was ultimately changed by doing so. There are readers who have helped us to carry our crosses as well. Without them, there was only despair.

A bishop visiting this prison for Mass several years ago had obviously been reading Beyond These Stone Walls. When Mass ended, and prisoners filed out of the prison chapel, the bishop grasped my arm as I passed and whispered four chilling words: “You are a prophet!” On our way out, Pornchai turned and asked, “What does that mean?” I responded, “It means my head is about to be lopped off!” As I have written in other posts, most of the saints we revere, and the prophets we heed, suffered greatly.

Pornchai was led from his own house of bondage, but Pope Benedict XVI was also influential in Pornchai’s conversion despite the severe trials that Pornchai faced in life. When Pornchai, a Buddhist since birth, first pondered the Catholic faith, he was moved by this segment of the brilliant book, Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, 2007) by Pope Benedict XVI:

“The most important thing about the figure of Moses is neither all the miraculous deeds he is reported to have done nor his many works and sufferings along the way from the ‘house of bondage in Egypt’ through the desert to the threshold of the Promised Land. The most important thing is that he spoke with God as with a friend... .

“It now becomes perfectly clear that the prophet is not the Israelite version of the soothsayer, as was widely held at the time and as many so-called prophets considered themselves. On the contrary, the prophet is something quite different. He shows us the Face of God, and in so doing he shows us the path we are to take. He points out the path to the true ‘exodus’ which consists in this: Among all the paths of history, the path to God is the true direction that we must seek and find.”

— Jesus of Nazareth, p4

Pornchai and I both faced many trials in life. It was our trials that thrust us into the same place and time in history. I do not know whether I ever spoke to God as a friend, but it was upon reading the above passage from Pope Benedict that Pornchai made his decision to journey with me from the exodus, through the desert, to the Promised Land toward which we, in hope, are destined. Faith never rescued us from our trials, but it taught us to carry one another’s cross like Simon of Cyrene. That is the key to Heaven. Even in suffering and sorrow, it is the key to Heaven.

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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Paths I crossed with Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell

Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

The Parable of a Priest and the Parable of a Prisoner

Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam

Pornchai Moontri reading from the Lectionary at Mass with Father John Hung Le, SVD and others from his order at the Divine Word Missionary Society Chapel in Nonthabury, Thailand.

One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanow. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”