Although I've read countless news accounts of the tremendous horror that visited the people of Nice recently, I still have difficulty fathoming the depth of the grief that it has occasioned.  Killings happen all over the world, yes, and grieving faces appear in the news daily, but watching this outpouring of remembrance and pain, captured so visibly and directly by an omnipresent news media, and listening to the survivors sharing their stories has broken me.  I have little else to say than to ask, "Why, God?"  Nothing I do will bring these people back, and nothing I say will be sufficient consolation to those who have lost loved ones in such sudden fashion and, it seems, nothing I say will move the heart of God to do anything to address what has happened.  He cannot change it, he cannot undo it: the world has, once again, displayed its epistemological contusions and chronological independence.  God can only stand by.
     So it seems.  Then why did Jesus, though he wept over the death of his friend Lazarus, go on to raise him from the dead, telling his friend Martha that, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me will live even if he dies" (John 11:25)?  Jesus did so because he knew that despite a world in which love too often seems gone, love prevails in ways that overwhelm all notions of form and presence:  the world itself cannot contain it.
     That's the beauty of God.  It's a beauty that puzzles and vexes, yes, but a beauty that, in a singularly sublime way, stuns and astonishes beyond our finite ken.  And this is precisely why, in these dark times, we need it.