Following up on yesterday’s brief (and scattered) post about the problem of evil…
Thinking about it reminded me of a story from high school. I was in German class with Father Vincent.
A lengthy aside: I will probably never forget Father Vincent. He was a very large man. And also very nice. I remember cringing watching him sit on one of the student desks and watching it bend under him. It truly looked like it would break.
But while he was a very large man, that’s not what really sticks out in my mind about him. I remember him introducing the concept of gendered nouns. Blackboards and flags are feminine in German. He would put his face up against the board and say that he didn’t see any bumps. Desks are masculine, and he turned his around to show us that there was nothing between the legs.
From another person this might have been creepy. But ours was an all-male Jesuit high school, and he was as inoffensive a priest as one could hope for. We all laughed at his jokes, earnestly, and got the point that gendered nouns had little to do with biological gender.
Anyway, back to class… We were watching a video. And the guy sitting behind me kept talking. And I was talking to him, mostly telling him to shut up.
Herr Vincent called me up to his desk and sent me down to the Principal’s office. I complained that that wasn’t fair, since I wasn’t the only one talking. He told me that life wasn’t fair.
That bugged me a lot. Not just because I thought of him as a nice guy, but because he was a priest for heaven’s sake! I knew life wasn’t fair. But as a priest, shouldn’t he be working to make it a bit more fair? Isn’t that part of the job description?
And maybe that’s what bugs me about God sometimes. I grant that life isn’t fair. But if God is all good, shouldn’t God be working hard to make it more fair?
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