“Let me not squander the hours of my pain” — Rilke
So how does an existential event like this impact me? Sure, there is the anxiety and fear. But here are the gifts: reconciling with an estranged father, reconnecting with old friends and girlfriends, checking in with neighbors and people in the community, and the feeling of solidarity with humanity and a deeper love of God.
That doesn't negate the suffering and evil. But is this by chance or intention? Is there a justified reason for such things as pandemics? Well, those our questions above my pay-grade. But for anti-viral shots and giggles, let's take a stab.
You got the people who believe God is neither transcendent and immanent (secularists). Those who think God is transcendent but not immanent (deists). And those who think think God is immanent but not transcendent (pantheists). They all got some excuse for this, but it's either too one-sided or completely incomplete.
If we take the Judeo-Christian perspective, we know God is transcendent. So He is responsible for the first cause of the building blocks for creation. But all those secondary causes: stars exploding, viruses forming, politicians bickering; those are just accidents from one view and God's infinite schema from another. We just can't explain it all as a singular event when there are so many moving parts in God's plan. So viruses just want to do what viruses do. Sadly, politicians do too.
Yet also from the Judeo-Christian perspective, God is imminent and still with us during these trials: “the earth is full of His glory.” As I recently heard Paul VanderKlay say: “Tolkien is not in the Lord of the Rings, but yet he is everywhere in the Lord of the Rings.” So while we have our own agency, it is not in competition with God's agency (strange attractor that it is) either. He's in the play, feeding us lines every so often. There's always the perpetual interplay of freedom and destiny.
Still, as Rutledge notes, evil is not nothing. We can't really just say it is an absence of Good, but more like a negation. She notes, “if we speak of evil simply as absence, we are in danger of abstracting its malign effects, or distancing ourselves from them.” And that's not how we need to engage in this moment. Evil has it's own force, although not ontological as God would be. We can't explain it away, and it has it's own explanation that we can't truly understand. Rutledge says the best response to this is often silence—a silence that may bring closer to an authentic response that words would never accomplish.
So while evil and suffering can make you struggle with God, it can't negate His existence. There's the famous quote by Rabbi Milton Steinberg that sums this point up: “The believer of God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering, the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else. So let me struggle with God.”
Maybe instead of trying to answer the big questions around God's relationship to crises like what we are currently going through, it is probably best to answer what is our relationship as individuals to all of this. As Bishop Barron recently said, let's instead consider “what is the opportunity for love that has opened up to me in this moment?”