A Love Supreme

Ed. Note: This is the third installment in a three-part series. The first, “The Small Origins of Big Things,” appeared in our October 2024 issue, and the second, “History Never Happened,” in December.

If God is God He is not good,
If God is good he is not God;
Take the even, take the odd…

­— Archibald MacLeish, “J.B.”

Twenty twenty-four was the year I hated God. My resentment had been building for some time as I watched sexual abuse and the transplantation of cheap politics for deep theology eat away at the Catholic Church. Even earlier, when I was in high school, I had read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and could find no answer to the blasphemous charges the fictional inquisitor had leveled against Christ. Like him, I wanted answers. Why would God allow evil to exist in the Church? Why should human beings suffer in the world God had made? These unanswered questions resurged with a vengeance, and on New Year’s Day 2024 the dam broke.

That afternoon, television screens and smartphones in Japan lit up with warnings of a massive earthquake under the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture, on the side of the Japanese island of Honshu that faces the continent of Asia. The next few days were filled with images I will never forget. Houses buckled in the violent shaking — top floors pancaked onto bottom floors, crushing people who had been enjoying time with their families. Fire swept through a market town, destroying lives and livelihoods. A tsunami of black, swollen sea swallowed up a line of coast. Mountainsides broke loose and slid into valleys, taking homes and helpless people with them in a cascade of boulders and trees. A woman kneeling on the ground outside a ruined dwelling took off her jacket and placed it over the cold, dead body of her daughter, who had been pulled from the rubble. A man’s eyes smarted in disbelief during an interview with news crews as he realized his wife of half a century was gone.

A cruel January snow then started to fall on the rescuers and those left homeless by the natural disaster. Bitter cold mocked the nakedness of the already poor. Some schoolchildren sang a happy song in an unheated gymnasium that had been converted into a makeshift shelter. The people who listened shed tears through their forced smiles. Days stretched into weeks, then months. Many people gave up on Ishikawa and moved elsewhere, leaving the twisted remains of their shattered lives behind.