"Darkness is a question that must be asked seriously. Quick or sure religious answers to darkness offer us no hope because they shut down the question."

I love the set up of this syntax; the idea of "darkness" as something of a question, and not as something to be avoided. Corrigan has been drilling in the same idea, the same turn of phrase bout this subject since the beginning of the semester: there are no pat answers, or, there is no reason to rush towards them. That our faith and lives are not defined by the fact that we have questions, doubts, uncertainties, but how well we go about our journey for answers. Wrestling with grief, with sadness, with uncertainty doesn't make you any less of anything.

Jesus wept. Showing up four days after his friend had died, Jesus didn't arrive in a flowing superhero cape, toss aside the stone at the door of his tomb with one hand and fix the situation with a phrase called out in a booming voice: he wept. He was not an observer of Mary and Martha's suffering; he experienced it with them.

We imagine God as this supernatural Mr. Incredible, coming just in the nick of time in response to our cry for help, instead of as a co-sufferer. We forget that in Jesus living a human life with human limitations and exposure to temptations, he really does understand. I imagine him sometimes, facing temptation with a serene face instead of a twisted brow, his character out-of-line with the idea that temptation might actually, well, tempt him. But if Jesus came down here with no desire to sin, with nothing in his physically human makeup trying to warp him towards saving his own life, or towards his own glory, living a sinnless life means little. It's like saying that the only way a snake can "sin" is to grow wings and fly, and thus, snakes are saints.

I'm not rushing to an answer, because when I shake in the dark, I want to know where is God when little girls are getting sold into child prostetution, or when people literally starve to death on one side of the globe and people spend tens of millions on researching the cure for a disease called "having unluscious, short eyelashes" or any number of things that make me sick to my stomach, but when I finally do get there, and you can't call it a pat answer, because it doesn't leave me settled; it doesn't fit over my face like a snug, warm, blindfold, but I know that God is suffering, too. I think it's especially important to remember that today; that Jesus suffered and suffered hard so that we, as his people, could bring more pain to his heart, every day, but also so that some of us could be spared, if we'd only say "yes."

Happy Easter, everybody.