Is this the best of all possible worlds?  So asked Candide in French Enlightenment figure Voltaire's book of the same name.  Beaten, kidnapped, shipwrecked, stabbed in the stomach, and more, Candide asked this question constantly.  In one of Voltaire's most biting satires of the prevailing Christian perspective of his day, Candide questioned why, in light of his misadventures, the Church continued to insist that God could not have made a better world.
     It's not a question one answers easily.  If we look at it against Percy Walker's novel Love in the Ruins, however, we might be able to frame it in a different light.  Love in the Ruins tells the story of Thomas More, an erstwhile doctor turned patient turned doctor again who, as the world he knows appears to be falling apart, hooks himself up with multiple women and what he hopes will be the professional success of a lapsometer, an instrument which he contends measures the human soul.  Like Candide who, as his tale draws to a close, finds himself in his garden, peaceful and content, the doctor, as his story ends, as a bloody uprising of the underclass decimates the insular paradise of the affluent, More finds himself settling comfortably into bed, wrapped in the warmth of the woman he loves most.  Here I am, he says, "at home in bed where all good folk belong."
     Garden or bed, both protagonists finish their journeys away and apart from the world that has caused them so much grief.  So it seems that, regardless of how their lives in the world have been, what matters for Candide and More most is that they have the fullness of personal peace.
     Would it be better if these men had not endured the pain to find their peace?  I suppose.  Would it be more pleasing if Christianity didn't insist that despite its flaws, this world is indeed the best of all possible worlds--because God made it?  Again, I suppose. We can, I suppose, conclude that, in a crazy and unpredictable world, better that we seek peace now than peace with a God we cannot see, a God whose creation seems to undermine us at every turn.
     I suppose.  But this still leaves us with the unanswerable question:  why is life how it is?  God confuses, yes, yet we confuse ourselves, too.  And we know frightfully little.
     Which confusion do you choose?