Suffering and evil are problems for people of faith. The universe, according to Richard Dawkins, the brilliant biologist and enemy of religion, is without pity. It is simply the way it is. He writes:

A female digger wasp not only lays her eggs on a caterpillar so that her larva can feed on it but she carefully guides her sting into each ganglion of the prey's central nervous system so as to paralyze it but not kill it. This way the meat keeps fresh. This sounds savagely cruel but nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

This does not, of course, mean that unbelievers are indifferent to suffering. They respond to it like the rest of us, with sorrow and compassion; but for them it is not a philosophical problem, it does not conflict with their world-view. But suffering is an enormous problem for people of faith.

How can a benevolent and omnipotent God designedly create the female digger wasp to lay her larva on a caterpillar? Darwin asked. Just as, in the years after the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel describes the execution by hanging of a young boy in one of the concentration camps. He tells us that as the boy twitched in his death throes at the end of a rope, a voice was heard crying out: Where is God now? And I heard a voice within me answer him: Where is he? Here he is - he is hanging here on these gallows.

For many of us there is a deliberate ambiguity in the reply, and it is the anguish of faith to live with the ambiguity. To believe that God was killed with the little Jewish boy can mean that any idea of God is now dead, was unable to survive the meaninglessness of this great outrage. Or can it mean that God is so identified with us in our sorrow that he dies with our deaths and goes with us to all our calvaries? Which is it? That is the great question of faith, the question that gives faith its anguish, on Good Friday and every day.

Theologians who responded to the Holocaust had to abandon many of the ideas about God they had previously held. The only God who could hold our allegiance was a suffering God, a crucified God. It is, of course, much easier to abandon God altogether than to go on making excuses for him. Yet many of us cannot do that.

There is something about life itself that calls us to believe, even though our faith co-exists with pain and doubt. Life is more than sorrow and horror. There is also beauty and meaning: there is love and there is compassion; there are saints and great souls.

This is part of what we mean by Resurrection. We are a Good Friday people and we will never deny the tragedies of time. But we are also a Resurrection people. We believe that the great mystery of Christ's dying points beyond itself, beyond the tragedy of time, the cruelty of nature, the sorrow, the dying, the plagues, the deathbeds, the crying in the night, to a transfigured universe.

In a short, remarkable book, Mary, Mother of Sorrows, Mother of Defiance, Peter Daino, a Catholic missioner who works in Kenya, calls the anger and pain he feels as he confronts the starvation of children in Africa, A apostolic grief. He says that the most helpful question one can ask about grief is, Whom will your grief serve? Apostolic grief asks not A where does the tragedy come from? but where does it lead?

The Christian response to suffering is not to account for it but to find God in it. This is not the passivity of resignation, though acceptance of inescapable necessity may be part of it, but the activity of defiance. This is the using of grief and anger to contend against the forces that cause suffering. The word martyr comes from a Greek word that means one who bears witness. Sometimes that bearing of witness leads to death, sometimes to a lesser death of obloquy and persecution. But we never lose heart because we are all called to be Christian witnesses.

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