Have you read Elie Weisel's Night?  If you have not, please take a moment to find it and read it.  Carefully.  It's the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner's memoir of his time at Auschwitz.  Although I find many of its passages singularly disturbing, perhaps one of the most painful is one that describes Weisel's reaction to the hanging of a fifteen year old Dutch boy who had been caught collaborating with the Resistance.

    Before the entire camp, the German overlords of Auschwitz hanged this unfortunate young man.  Everyone had to watch.  As he did so, Weisel recounts hearing one of the onlookers say, "Where is God?  Where is He?" Then, Weisel remembers, "For more than half an hour the child stayed there struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes.  And we had to look him full in the face . . . Behind me I heard the same man asking, 'Where is God now?'  And I heard a voice within me answer him, 'Where is He? Here He is--He is hanging here on this gallows.'"

    Weisel's account might push some us of faith to the very brink of that faith.  If God is hanging on the gallows, of what use can he possibly be to us?  What is God really doing?

    Yet that's the point.  God isn't about power; he's about weakness.  So why would we wish for a weak God?  It is this:  it is in suffering our suffering that God speaks to us most clearly.  If God cannot descend into our suffering, he becomes the God of Deism:  there, but not.

    Yet even if a suffering God seems to make little sense in this situation, absent him, there's no sense at all:  our lives are simply running into an endless sea.

    Can you swim?