To live is to, unfortunately, suffer.  Part of living in a bent and broken world is experiencing misfortune, be it mental, spiritual, or material, misfortune that sometimes drives people to despair.
     The aftermath of World War I was no exception.  Although the West had entered the twentieth century optimistic about itself and its future, the carnage and pain of the War cruelly shattered these illusions, dashing them into the soil that by the War's end had absorbed the blood of millions of young men.  The future looked decidedly less hopeful.  Great despair ensued.
     In addition, though religion is, by most definitions, a call to hope or trust in something bigger than this world, even religion could do little to forestall the sense of hopelessness and ennui that swept through Western Europe.  It quickly pervaded every layer of society.
     What could religion do?  Buffeted by these forces of modernity, the conservative wings of Christianity and Judaism retreated into themselves, ensconcing their people in a box from which they were not to emerge for nearly fifty years.  On the other hand, the liberal sectors of these religions, though not fully agreeing with the tenets of modernity that undergirded this societal despair, chose instead to embrace and step into the pain of the planet.  They set aside moral uneasiness to bring their religion to those who needed it most.
     However, just as religion in the twentieth-first century does not always satisfy everyone, so did religion during this time period fail to fully mollify as well.  How could it?  Even if we believe, as most religions do, that God is present in suffering, this does not necessarily end it.  Nor does it always explain it.  Religion found itself caught on the horns of a dilemma, to believe in the light while embracing the darkness, to walk through the world's pains while speaking of a grace in and beyond it.
     In the end, it asked the West to trust, nothing more, nothing less, to trust in what it could not see to overcome what it could.  To recognize that although the world had closed in on them, God had opened it again.  Better to face the questions than pretend nothing had happened.