I am enjoying a salad bar in a popular restaurant yesterday, reading the account of the Newtown Connecticut slaughter of innocent children and teachers ar Sandy Hook Elementary last year, and I am overcome with sadness and start to weep and have to stop reading the book.
Mental illness and violence has become a big problem, at it reared it ugly head at Navsea again this week, and, as Yancy has the courage to confess, most things like this just play themselves out without any intervention from the creator and sustainer of the Universe.....whom we call God.
In the pre release of his book, "The Question that Never Goes Away, Why?" which like all his books is gripping and powerful, the conclusions are simple and powerful. All religions have an answer to some degree. The Buddists say life is suffering, live with it and find mind numbing nirvana, the Hindus say your suffering is deserved from sins of a previous life, bad karma.
Christian revelation allows us to question, to scream why, to complain, but its answer lies in Jesus, who entered into the worlds violence and suffering and said to us, I am with you, we will go through this together. A God interested not so much in what happened wbut who you become in the midst of what is happening.
The suffering of innocent children whether it is war, gun violence, hunger and famine, is where the saddness screams the loudest, and Yancy has had the difficult priviledge of being invited into most of those places during his writing career, and what a perspective it has given him to share reverently a few ideas about the why of it all.
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