When your beloved began to suffer, she felt so small, so vulnerable. The path that lay ahead looked so hard. The days went by, and the path grew steeper.

Where were you?

You were right there with her, co-suffering. Just as you had been there when she rejoiced, and you rejoiced with her, so you had to suffer with her. Because you love, your co-suffering was not meaningless. It was for her; it was with her. Your co-suffering carried her along the path that was hers to walk. Love does the impossible, and willingly you took her suffering upon yourself to help her go where she had to go.

In the end, death took her. But what did that mean? Wasn’t it you who carried her to heaven? Did your love really do the impossible? Can it be that your love has entered heaven with your beloved?

Allowing ourselves to grieve is allowing ourselves to love, to continue to do the impossible. What does grief tell us? In death, there is love. Perhaps another absurdity arises: Where there is love, there is life. Love was the mode of our life with our beloved for all those years, and it was love that folded into our lives a transcendent dimension of meaning.

In course of life, did you give up on the notion of God, doubting the possibility of divine goodness? Your grief is your love doing the impossible: it is still reaching into the transcendence whose existence you had denied. And if your grief gathers itself into lamentation, it now communicates to you that mortality is not all there is. Immortality calls to you in your grief. You doubted that you could participate in transcendent mystery, but now it participates in you. No, you don’t believe in a God, still less a good God, but in love and grief, your heart seems to supersede your mind.

All we can do now for our deceased beloved is to continue to love. But this is just as it always was. To continue to love is to fill the emptiness of absence with presence. Love that reaches into the remoteness of the cosmos for the beloved eventually brings that cosmos back to us in the mode of intimacy. If love drives grief, then it is also love that bridges the chasm and joins life and death together in the tender mystery of the cosmos that holds them both.

Where is God?

Philosophically, this question relies upon a more fundamental one: what do we think God is? Or who do we take God to be?

If God was silent when we needed a miraculous, perhaps magical, intervention, or if God did not give a sign when we asked for it, then what does this tells us about our God-relationship?

Often we consider God to be a divine equivalent of a mechanic or a medic, a handy-man who owes us service. We appeal to God in the name of justice, imposing a criterion that would surely have the authority to call forth divine action.

But God is silent.

God seems not to hear our prayers or seems to ignore our pleas. The result is often that we conclude that either God does not exist or that God is not good and just.

What if the problem lies not in God but in our God-relationship? Perhaps we have overlooked, dismissed, or forgotten that God is also personal, a trinitarian communion of persons-in-love. This might change the calculus.

Just as good parenting is not modeled by the “helicopter parent” who intervenes at every difficulty to fix every problem and to act as a shield against every vulnerability, but knows when to let trouble happen and permits a degree of difficulty and suffering, so the God-relationship does not rely upon a divine action to alter the conditions of reality.

The God-relationship is a human-divine relationship of persons.

You walked that path with your beloved, not because of what you could get out of it, but because of the love that united you, and in your grief, God grieves along with you.

So, where is God?

God is where your love is, stretching from here and now through life and death to your beloved in the paradox of the cosmos that is both remote and intimate at once. Your love-relationship with your beloved was always a mirror of the God-relationship, no matter how inchoately. God was there.

Our love is imperfect, not through a fault of love, but only because human persons lack the perfection that only God can be. When we love most perfectly, we love from more than we are able to love. David Walsh reminds us that “We could not love if love had not made it possible for us to love, for it is not we who love but love that loves within us.”[3]

The Case of Job

Job is an Old Testament character who has become the archetype of the sufferer who passes from misery and meaninglessness to a meaningful life beyond his sufferings. The mythos of his predicament has become totemic for anyone who grieves.

The story goes that God allowed Job’s accuser, Satan, to test him. This permission was not given due to divine recklessness, frivolity, or unseriousness. Rather, God had profound trust in Job, convinced that, no matter his sufferings, he would not curse Him.

Job, a wealthy man, first loses his property. He does not denounce God. A family man, he next loses his children. Still he does not denounce God. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I depart.”[4] On the third affliction, Job is at last broken. Compounding his dreadful losses, he is now diseased and wretched.

Job curses the day of his birth, but still will not curse God.

He suffers as all human beings do: by bodily pain, by feelings, and by intellectual confusion. He asks Why? Why has this happened to him? He knows that he does not deserve his sufferings. His situation makes no sense.

The story of Job features three friends who come to visit, each of whom counsel him to beg forgiveness of God who is surely punishing him for some violation. The friends’ advice is born of a frame of mind that sees not what is owed in love but in justice. And justice calls for Job to make amends.

Job is convinced that, in his God-relationship, he has violated nothing. The advice of his friends lacks the reasonableness that would help him to resolve his confusion, and he is left with the “surd” of inexplicable suffering.

So intense is his suffering that he demands an answer from God. He demands his day in court. This is Job’s call for justice, but unlike his friends, he is not seeking the return of what is due, but an answer that would make sense of his undeserved suffering that God has allowed to happen.

That is, Job’s call for justice is rooted in his God-relationship, one that was forged in a love beyond justice. In that God-relationship, Job and God were bonded in a communion of human-divine persons. Just as God trusted Job, so too does Job trust that God can satisfy his need for meaning in his suffering.

Only God can answer the question of why we must suffer. So, Job repeatedly cries out the searing rawness of his question, and in doing so, he intensifies the mystery of suffering for himself. “Why did you bring me from the womb?” “Why do you hide your face and count me as your enemy?”[5]

In questioning his suffering, he is questioning reality. He is growing his soul beyond the filth and sickness of his body, and his lamentation never ceases to address God as another “You.”

Eventually, the crescendo builds to the point where Job can announce to his own heart, “I know that my redeemer lives.”[6]

God has heard Job and now enters the story. Job has demanded answers from God, but God proceeds to put questions to Job first. God knows Job but now asks him who he is. Who does Job take himself to be against the vast mystery of the creation of the cosmos? Where was Job when God was laying down the foundations of the universe?[7]

Job achieves the astounding insight that he was out-questioning all possible answers. The answers he sought are not answers proportionate to his human mind. The answer to the question of suffering is not available to him because it exceeds the human ability to grasp it. The question of suffering is a question that probes and enters the mystery of transcendent meaning.

Job accepts that there is no answer to suffering that would comport with his intellect, limited as it is, but mystery is not meaningless. God conveys to Job that suffering, catastrophe, chaos, and death belong to the same mystery from which flourishing, order, and life emerge. The inaccessible mystery is where God’s justice exceeds all injustice, where God’s order overcomes all disorder, and where God’s ways are hidden yet far above all ways. Inaccessible mystery is the alpha and omega of love that binds all love-relationships to the God-relationship.

Job’s suffering is mitigated at last by his experience of divine mystery, present in his midst. The intellectual grasp of why he must suffer remains unanswered, not because there is no answer but because such an answer exceeds what the human mind can understand. God is Mystery who holds all such answers, but Job is nonetheless consoled by the loving presence of God who addresses him by name and reassures him that he is not ready for the answer to his questions. Divine Mystery comforts him in his suffering by simply being personally present.

In the love that drives the human-divine God-relationship, Job achieves the impossible: he overcomes his boundless grief. He holds fast to God who hears his cry and who blesses and restores Job.