Is there anybody out there?

When bad things happen to good people, it can make you wonder whether God has taken a sabbatical. Patrick McCormick lauds authors who grope for a response to the mystery of human suffering and to the puzzling silence of God.

WHEN I GET SICK, I MEAN RE,ALLY SICK, I WANT TO be visited by a priest who s a little bit scared of being at my bedside, somebody just a tad uncertain that his chrism and beads are potent enough magic to face the demons there.

I want to be able to look into his eyes and know he's not completely sure he has answers for the question of my suffering. I want to see that he's disturbed, unsettled, maybe a little angry at disease and death, at least at mine. I don't want him to be the kind of guy who finds it easy to visit neonatal intensive-care units, a young cleric who hasn't been battered around by God's stony silence. I want him to be the sort of fractured but faithful believer that Graham Greene, Walker Percy, or Flannery O'Connor would have written about. I want him to show up, but not to show off.

Maybe that's what I liked about two recent books by Reynolds Price and Annie Dillard. When these authors grope for a response to the mystery of human suffering and to the apparent indifference of a God who's supposed to be all-powerful and all-merciful, they sound a bit tentative. Like they know their words are as much a prayer as an answer. Like they know they could be whistling in the dark, but that such whistling is the only response they've got, and that they are not going to give up or let us sit there without so much as an accompanying tune.

You've got to appreciate folks who are willing to walk into the most disturbing terrain of the religious imagination armed only with a little courage, compassion, and grace.

Reynolds Price wrote Letter to a Man in the Fire (Scribner, 1999) in response to two questions posed by a young medical student dying of cancer, two questions that are the book's subtitle: "Does God Exist and Does He Care?" Jim Fox, who had read Price's cancer memoir, A Whole New Life (Penguin USA, 1995), wrote the author about his own struggles with the disease and about his desire "to believe in a God who cares ... because I may meet him sooner than I had expected."

Price admits that he comes to the task at hand without the skills of a trained theologian or even the habit of regular church attendance. What he does bring, however, is a rich familiarity with scripture and literature's best efforts at probing and facing human suffering--and the unblinking and compassionate eye of"a watchful human in his seventh decade who harbored a similar killing invader in his body a few years ago, and who thinks he was saved by a caring, though enigmatic God."

If reading this letter doesn't provide us with the rigorous proofs we once looked for in Anselm, Aquinas, and answer boxes, it does at least furnish us with the unflinching witness of a fellow believer who has faced the demons in question and remains convinced of the compassion of an often silent God.

It is this silence that interests and baffles Price, a silence that for him seems both willful and mysterious, and from which too many Christian apologists have been willing to look away.

"I've come more and more to wish that the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity--and a great many more modern clergy and counselors--had forthrightly confronted the silence at the very heart of any God we can worship and that they had observed it more unflinchingly with us, not dimming our view with rose-colored screens and sweet-voiced chatter that are certain to smash or go cold-dumb at the first touch of heat, not to mention the scalding breath of terror at the sight of pained death."

Part of the problem, according to Price, is our exaggerated need to see God as a father, an intimate parent bending over our crib or accompanying us on our first trip to school. An overreliance on this image may be comforting, but it hardly prepares us for our encounters with a God who, while benign and loving, is also "far more silent and unpredictable than anything I'd hope to call abba in this world." Indeed, even Jesus--who urges us to pray ceaselessly to a parent who will not give us stones for bread--encounters a profoundly silent God in Gethsemane and on Golgotha.

In Annie Dillard's For the Time Being (Knopf, 1999) it is not God's silence but our smallness that is so disturbing. In a universe with 80 billion galaxies, each having no fewer than 100 billion suns, we are each only one of more than 5 billion souls living on a planet where nearly 80 billion have already died. We are the 125,000th generation of humans, and we will be gone and forgotten as swiftly as the 75th or the 92,001st or the next.

Do you remember the 138,000 people who were drowned by a tidal wave in Bangladesh on April 30, 1991? Or the 780,000 killed by an earthquake in Tangshan in 1976? Or the 21 to 22 million taken by the flu epidemic of 1917-1918?

"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself--in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love--and multiply that by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it." How can any one of us, Dillard wonders, really believe that we matter enough to get God's attention?

And yet if Dillard's own book is any indication, she believes, somehow, that God is attending--that we matter, and that in some way we are called upon to be the eyes and ears and hands of this attentive deity. In a wide-ranging narrative that skips from accounts of monstrously handicapped infants and reflections on the history of sand and clouds to scenes from the life of the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin and the insights of Hasidic rabbis, Dillard gives us a butterfly's view of the universe--scattered but intimate.

And it is the intimacy of her glance that betrays a compassion for "even the least of these." For in taking a long, loving look at these children, in remembering the anonymous and long-forgotten dead, in wondering at the story of an infinitesimal grain of sand, Dillard reveals a God who might actually hear the cries of those looking for a 14-year-old Brooklyn girl named Shuri Feldman lost in the woods off the Connecticut turnpike.

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon a dozen years ago, a bright, gregarious friend of mine found out he had Lou Gehrig's disease. Tom Hoar was 52, fun-loving, and immensely generous. He had just celebrated his 25th anniversary of ordination. Eighteen months later he was dead. Any of us over 30 have a couple of stories like this--and even if we didn't, there is enough misery in hospitals, bad weather, and war zones to fill in the gaps of our personal suffering.

These two little books by Price and Dillard don't provide security blankets against the madness at our doorsteps, only companionship for those who are willing to look hard into the cracks of life, and a reminder that no matter how much it feels otherwise, we will not be alone.

By PATRICK McCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.