Every Halloween, when my wife and I prepare for the many people who will come to our door looking for treats, we post a note on the door, a note drawn from a verse in the first letter of the apostle John.  This verse reads, "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all."
     Only a few words, but they contain a profound truth.  Regardless of how we may feel about a situation of misfortune or tragedy, be it one involving us directly or one that affects some--or many millions--of our fellow human beings, we remind ourselves that, despite it all, God remains light.  God is light that is always present, light that is always loving, light that is always moving, moving with meaning and purpose, even in the darkest of darknesses, even in the deepest of maws and abysses.
     For many of us who are contemplating tomorrow's anniversary of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, this is tough to swallow.  Where was God the morning of September 11?  Why didn't he stop the hijackers from flying those airplanes into the towers?  Why did he allow all those people to die?
     I can't answer this question.  No one can.  No one can tell us why, really and ultimately, these things happen.  And no one can tell us why God seems to stand by when they do, watching, maybe even laughing, unwilling to care, unwilling to intervene.  No one.  Our finitude simply will not allow it.
     What can we do?  Whether we are remembering the tragedy of September 11 and the thousands of lives it ended (and the many more thousands of lives it changed forever), or one that has ripped our own life completely asunder, we need to believe that regardless of what we may think, and irrespective of what we may see, God is--and always will be--light.  We need to believe that, somehow, some way, God, the God who once sent his son to die for us, will always be our light, our beacon, our measure and fountain of greatest hope, the light in which, as the psalmist puts it (Psalm 36), even in the blackest of nights, "we see light."
     Though these words represent but a very short (and perhaps, for some, inadequate) response to the perceived absence of God in the midst of tragedy, I trust they underscore, in part, an enduring point:  "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all."