I visited a friend of mine a few years ago. He was a deeply faithful theologian, but without much success in his profession. Deeply devoted to each other, he and his wife had yearned for children but were unable to have any. When his wife died unexpectedly, my friend was distraught. We talked, and the accumulated humiliations, disappointments, and losses of his adulthood were recounted with increasing anguish. At one point he blurted out, with a startling passion and anger, “Why me?!”
His question, to be honest, surprised me. It did not seem to fit his Christian faith—not that he should have meekly adopted an Augustinian sense of being part of the great massa damnata, for whom all ills are well-deserved and any smidgeon of good is an unmerited grace.
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