In this time of global crisis, I share this excerpt from a book, Thinking about God, which I published in 2007:

     "Materially speaking, we all learn different things from the darknesses of our lives.  The one who loses a spouse learns things that one who loses a home does not, and the person who suffers paralysis comes away with something that someone gripped by aimlessness may not.  Yet each of us who finds himself enmeshed in the throes of darkness, if we treat our experience rightly, finds a greater vision for understanding our life and understanding what is most trustworthy in it.  We are forever changed and, if we approach our experience intelligently, for the better.  Bottom line, we grow in holiness.

            If we approach darkness with respect, we will enter into the larger meaning and perspective and wisdom it bequeaths.  We learn that in the panic of helplessness and the agony of uncertainty we find genuine power, a power rooted not in us, our abilities, or our wealth, but in our willingness and capacity to trust God.  We then find that in letting go of what we cannot know we find new ways to hang on to that which we irretrievably do:  the fact and presence of God.  We lose control of our circumstances but realize a deeper insight into our souls, our souls in which we bond, not with the travails of space and time, but with the perspective of eternity.  And we treat life with greater care, acutely understanding what it really it.

            We may never know why tragedy befalls us.  We may never know why the world is full of suffering.  We may never know why God seems silent in the face of destruction and pain.  Nor, despite all the ink that has been spilled attempting to answer these questions, we ever will (at least not in this life).  

All we know is that these things happen, that despair and tragedy visit every human being.  This is a fundamental fact of human existence.

For this reason, we know that we need to make a choice.  Do we want to believe that such things are absolutely random in a totally random universe?  Or do we want to believe that, below and beyond our world, God lives, granting purpose to all things?  How we choose will determine how we live.  Will we live with a sense of lingering uncertainty and despair, always wondering why, or will we live with a sense of abiding hope and purpose, always wondering not why, but how:  how will God make final sense of our situation?  It’s our choice.

Either way we choose, we recognize that like the eye of a hurricane, darkness nurtures wisdom in the midst of chaos, depth in the face of the shallowness and flimsiness of this material existence.  Its lessons are many and manifold.  Yet the darkness that is laid in the hands of God, the one who made us and the farthest stretches of the universe, offers the richest path of all.  

            Darkness transforms us by forcing us to trust in what we otherwise would not."