Answering the tough questions

Over the last 24 hours, my 12-year-old son has been asking difficult questions. Last night he wanted to know about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He asked whether any country could hit us with a nuclear missile and whether we had a way to stop it. The notion of detente didn't seem to sit that well with his still innocent mind. How could mutually assured destruction be a good thing, he seemed to ask with his eyes if not his words. We talked about war, about bombs, about human lives lost and saved. When our son left the kitchen, my husband, Dennis, turned to me and said, "He's starting to ask good questions." He's right. Our son has always asked deep questions but now, as he begins to see new facets of our world, the questions are getting more challenging, at least from a parent's perspective.

This morning, our son walked back into the kitchen for breakfast and saw the daily newspaper on the table. He read the headline: "Eight Killed at Care Facility." More challenging questions followed. What does that mean? Why would someone shoot people in a nursing home? And we could, once again, see the concern on his face, the kind of concern I remembered from 9-11, when he wondered if terrorists would knock down our house or his grandmother's Manhattan apartment building. If it can happen there, can it happen here, is what his young mind wants to know.

War, shootings, floods, disease. Every generation has to explain man-made tragedies and natural disasters to their children, but it never gets any easier, does it? And now, in our world our instant, and often graphic, communication, the questions are tinged with the added fear that seeing the visuals can cause. Of course, for many people, these kinds of questions bring them back to one place: Where was God? When I wrote my book on the catechism, I made sure I gave ample space to that eternal question, a question that has been posed to me not only by children but by friends who are curious or confused and sometimes by strangers who are unfriendly to the faith. Where was God when those bad things happened? Or, maybe more to the point of what they're really getting at, Why would God let that happen?

Well, our faith reminds us that God does not force choices upon us. He allows us to act freely, and, unfortunately, when given complete freedom, some people choose the path of evil. As I wrote in my book The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Catholic Catechism, Jesus Christ "did not come to fix the world's problems but to live amidst all the world's problems. Jesus came not only to suffer for us but to suffer with us...So God does not will evil; he permits evil out of respect for the freedom he has given all of his creation, and somehow, in ways we typically don't understand until much later on, he finds a way to bring good from bad."

Which seems perfectly fitting at this time of year, as we begin Passiontide and prepare for the sorrowful journey through Holy Week and the Triduum. Ours is a faith based on victory through the cross, death as the beginning of life. Every year, every day for that matter, we recognize that God can bring great good out of great evil, not only through the cross in Calvary, but through the daily crosses -- great and small -- that are part of the landscape of our lives.