Dear Good Samaritans,

Last week I was driving with my daughter and she asked me a painfully simple question with a profoundly hard answer: “why do things”—she was talking about bad things—”happen.”

Why do bad things happen?

I did what probably every parent would do in that situation. I mentally panicked. I hemmed and hawed. I racked my brain trying to think of a satisfying or comforting answer. After all, I am a priest. Shouldn’t I have insight into the inner workings of the universe, or at least the divine plan? But when it comes to this question, the answer is no. No, I don’t.

In that moment I had nothing. “I really don’t know, sweetie. I just really don’t know,” was what I could say honestly.

Last Sunday we heard the story of Jacob wrestling at night. At first we are told that it was a man he was wrestling. Later Jacob calls the place where he was wrestling Peniel, because “I have seen God face to face…” (Genesis 32:30). Still later, the prophet Hosea says that Jacob’s opponent was an angel. Those who favor this theory are divided, though—was it a good angel or a bad angel? Still other scholars have decided that it was a metaphorical struggle, an internal struggle within Jacob, reckoning with choices he made in his life that hurt others.

No matter what the details of the story are, Jacob’s wrestling tells us one of the things that I think we all know, at least subconsciously: to be human is to face struggle. It is a truth that we will all face in one way or another. Of course, there are things that can make it worse like not acknowledging our fears or our pride or our shortcomings. Jacob wrestled through the night rather than running from it, and he came out the other side limping, but blessed. His struggle did not end with an explanation, but it did end with the consolation that God was there throughout.

I think that’s as close as I’ve come to an answer for my daughter, or for myself. Scripture rarely tells us why. It does tell us, again and again, that God is present in the struggle—wrestling alongside us, refusing to let go even when we cannot make sense of what we’re enduring.

On Monday, when Bishop Thomas Daly of the Catholic Diocese of Spokane was finally able to reach the fire zone that has devastated the eastern side of our state, his team photographed a home reduced entirely to ash. Walls, roof, everything a family had built a life around was gone. Except for one thing. Left standing, untouched in all the rubble, was a small statue of the Virgin Mary.

I don’t offer you that image as proof of anything, or as an explanation for why the fire took that house and spared that statue. I don’t think that’s what it’s for. I don’t think the statue explains the fire. It simply reminds me that even in devastation, people keep looking for signs that God has not abandoned them. The fire did not choose to leave it. But for the people who will grieve that home, and for all of us watching from a distance, it stands as a small, stubborn witness that love and hope are not so easily burned away, even when nearly everything else is.

I still don’t know why bad things happen. I’ve got it on a long list of questions that I will interrogate God about someday. But I do believe, with Jacob and with that family in Spokane, that we are not left to wrestle in the dark by ourselves. God meets us there, in the struggle itself, and somehow—not always in ways we can explain—leaves something standing.

Peace,