WHERE WAS GOD?

On May 28, 2006, with the occasion of the pastoral visit that Pope Benedict XVI made to Poland, where he had the opportunity to visit the concentration camp complex of Auschwitz, built by Nazi Germany at the beginning of the world War II, where was practiced the most heinous genocide known in the history of mankind, with a balance of victims who, according to rough estimates, shows the awful number of over six million Jews, four million soviet prisoners of war and another few million more, still to  determined, between polish, political prisoners, freemasons, homosexuals, people with physical or mental limitations and common criminals, as well as some 800,000 gypsies, the Pope himself shuddered at the memory of the horror that is had been lived in those facilities. So great was the emotional impact that felt the successor of St. Peter, that even himself came to question the presence of God. In his speech at the farewell of his apostolic trip, is important to emphasize, among other things, the words devoted to this event: How many questions are imposed over us in this place? Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil? This words, spoken directly by the highest authority of the Catholic Church, are, over all, an invite to reflection for all us.

In our recent history, apart from the Holocaust that has been practiced in numerous extermination camps created by the Nazis, are countless the  loss of life that has been produced by external and violent causes: from the disasters caused by nature itself, such as tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc., until the most horrific acts of barbarism provoked by people who denigrate the human condition. In each and every one of these cases there is something that we believe has always missed us: God's presence, his protective hand. Like the Pope at Auschwitz, all who have lived some experienced, directly or indirectly, of any of these events, is have asked himself, more or less, the same questions: Where was God? How anyone who is considered infinitely just and kind may allow the death of so many innocents, in such tragic conditions? What crime have they committed to deserve such punishment? They are, in short, the same questions we ask when suffering hits us directly, or when something terribly wrong or undesirable is happening in our lives. These are questions that, by not to be within reach of human understanding, of course, have no convincing answer in our earthly world. Our conclusions only depend on what each one have as a benchmark of your own existence, which, for believers unconditional, is faith in God and the existence of another life;  for all others, just vicissitudes of fate.

A very succored argument that some use to justify inaction in God, is that if He constantly have to intervene to prevent cruelty and violence in our world, then we would be private of the power to act with our free will and, with it, of the necessary freedom to lead our lives with the dignity that belongs to us as creatures made in his image and likeness. Very weak argument, no doubt, if we consider that natural disasters are totally alien to the human will, and that many people are born without the minimum conditions necessary to voluntarily choose their destiny.

In a particularly way, in my specific case, the many lived experiences that I had, I have been moving to from positions more or less steady in the faith, to others closer to agnostic philosophy. When I see images like those of the recent irrational attack of the Boston Marathon, in which, between the dead, there are a child of only eight years old, who, waiting embrace his father when he had crossed the finish line, was physically dismembered by an explosive device planted by two fanatics wretches terrorists, one of them 19 years old, I feel how is crumbles many principles and I find it very difficult to understand the alleged goodness of the designs of Divine Providence. If we are truly the center of creation, how can we deserve so little attention from our Creator?

Since we are born and we got on the train of life, each with their own luggage: loaded with potential capabilities, goods and privileges in some case, and vacuum in many others, what, in principal, already puts some people in first class and others in the caboose, until  the end of life journey of our existence, in which the luck is distributed in form capriciously and arbitrarily, isn't seems easy to explain that there is one God for all, and, even less so, that He will be interested and  worried by what happens in this world. Another issue very different will be with what, or with who, we can meet in our last station, when, finished our journey, we have to get off the train. That it will be another story, but this, I fear, may never will be known.

C. Díaz Fdez.

April 2013