VOLTAIRE WAS RIGHT. Every death is a catastrophe. Eighty thousand deaths–that is a catastrophe I can’t even start to picture or apprehend. Eighty thousand claims against the property-owner, God.

Voltaire assumed we would be horrified by human deaths; and so he asked why we were created. Are we born just to die? What plan can this devastation imply?

To me the question works the other way. Why is this horrific? Because we are each, even when we do not know each other, worthy of love. Because we are each images of God. Because this horror is not what we were made for.

Death is not what we were made for. We were made for eternal life. We are right to be shocked by death; death is shocking. It doesn’t matter what would help us survive: I don’t doubt that acceptance of death would help us propagate our species. But death is wrong. This is wrong.

I don’t think the “problem of evil” can be “solved.” I think it can be lived through. I don’t know that people who have sustained terrible losses in this disaster–or any of the tiny disasters that happen every day, the cancer deaths and the accidents that never make the headlines–should expect to comfort themselves on the cold bones of theology. I do think we can all try to “suffer with” the people we know who are most directly affected. I do think Jesus, in His cradle and on His cross, is with you if you suffer now. I do think what has happened to you is wrong, and that God knows it is wrong.

I don’t expect that to help now. All there is now, is prayer.