When a child dies.

The church I serve is a small one, and in some ways the commonly heard idea that the church should be like a family is a reality here, for better or worse. Just as in a family at its best, people frequently bear one another's burdens and accept people in their complexities; and just as in families at their worst, there are sometimes long-standing arguments, old grudges, and generalizations "He was always like that...") that freeze people into their places. For the most part, it is a warm, closely-knit community, and people work together well.

When a tragedy hits at this level, it shows how deep the reality of the church-as-family can be. A few weeks ago a little girl, two years and four months old, died suddenly. She choked on a grape as she played with her brothers, and when her mother saw her falling it was too late. The grief of Anna's parents is bottomless. The rest of us remembered her from the previous Sunday, running around, singing--she was a lively, delightful girl--and everyone has been mourning. Parents wonder how they can explain this to children who think often of Anna; everyone asks "why?" And of course there is no answer.

It is the great sin of some religious people to think that there is a satisfactory answer to a tragedy of this sort, and to tell the afflicted parents such dreadful things as, "At least you have the other two," or "God must have needed her," or "She's in heaven now," or "It must have been her time." Some people are more patient than I am with the intentions of these people; they only want to console, they mean well. I know that. But their words can go in like knives, and it seems to me that there is a kind of sentimental rudeness here, at least, and a terrible insensitivity.

I was fifteen when my sister Grace died suddenly. She was eighteen months old and had just begun to walk, and one of our favorite photographs was of this little girl crossing a room carrying a copy of a book called Understanding Language. Her death was devastating. When people said stupid and banal things to my parents, or to me, I was furious. The morning after her death I thought the sun shouldn't shine, water shouldn't flow, the world shouldn't work in the pleasant, indifferent way it usually does.

Nothing can console you after a loss like this, and there were no answers to the question, "How can a child die before her parents? What can make this all right, what can square this with the belief that God is good?" What answer could make you say, "Oh, then--that makes it all right!" We hope for resurrection, for reunion with those we love, but the reality now is that we are not with them, and their loss is close to unbearable. The death of a child is a sign that the world, as it is, is not all right, that because of sin, death reigns here, and it is not supposed to be that way. The only way to avoid the pain of living in a world like this is to refuse to love at all.

The morning of Anna's funeral I spent some time with the Book of Job. I realize that there are some scholars who see the end of the Book of Job as a tacked-on thing, an attempt to wrap everything up, and I have to admit that I agree with the reaction of a Jewish friend who said of the fact that Job had a second fortune and new children, "Big deal!" That really doesn't work--you'd reject it in fiction, and it sure doesn't work in life. But what is most important here is God's rebuke to Job's comforters, the people who tell him that his afflictions came about because of his sinfulness, or because the happiness of the just is always short-lived, or because God was testing his faith. But God says, "I bum with anger against you and your two friends, for not having spoken correctly about me as my servant Job has done." God commands Job to pray for his friends, while they are commanded to sacrifice in atonement for what amounts to dishonesty with God.

But what was Job's "correct speaking" Although God's answer to Job is in some sense not an answer--God says, in effect, "I know what I am doing and you do not and cannot"--it is a response to Job's anguished, "Why?" It is essential for us to ask this question; we would be inhuman if we did not. And it will not be answered. Job, confronted with God, says, "Before, I knew you only by hearsay/but now, having seen you with my own eyes,/I retract what I have said,/and repent in dust and ashes." It is essential for us to ask why the innocent suffer, and essential for us to understand that we will not understand. This is what makes Job justified before God, and it is false consolation and simplification that makes God "bum with anger" against Job's friends.

A tragedy of this depth forces us to confront the mystery of the cross, which exists because the world is not at all what it is meant to be. In this world there can be no satisfactory answer to the question, "Why do the innocent suffer?" Any satisfactory answer would literally be obscene, whose root meaning is, "in the wrong place." Here we do not have the possibility of answering the question. As Christians we know there is one who suffers with us, we have the hope of resurrection, and we have nothing else.