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53 x Faith’s Challenges If our understanding of power is going to be real for us, it is going to have to connect with the living out of our days. In this, we have two problems to face. On the one hand, we need to recognize our finitude, our limits. We run up against our limits all the time: we aren’t smart enough or strong enough to accomplish a desired objective. This frustrating finitude does not always wear dramatic garb. There are the husband and wife, genuinely devoted to each other, “talking past” each other. There are those good and earnest parents discovering that they cannot meet all the needs of their children. One size does not fit all, and, besides, there isn’t time enough. Verily! So often, there isn’t time enough to do what we earnestly desire to do. Looking (a little?) further down the road, we see the dark specter of our death; there isn’t time enough. How much time would be enough? Well, more than that child had dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. Indeed, back in the middle of things, we sense the passing of precious moments all too quickly. Those grandkids grow up too fast, don’t they? Honeymoons fade, as do the phases of the moon. If we are to live lives of genuine power, we need to find a way to face up to our finitude. We are not going to stop being finite, but we want to be able to look our limitedness in the eyes and still live powerfully. Chapter 3 to Believe, FaCing Finitude: trusting together in hope 54 love’s availing power Then there is something more. As we try to get somewhere in this business of living, something else gets in our way: evil. I am not thinking of earthquakes and the like. They travel on the territory of finitude, though many “natural” disasters certainly have a human element in their causality, at least as an exacerbating factor. But there is plenty more to talk about: Jews being marched into gas chambers, Native Americans being marched down the Trail of Tears.1 We can switch to a smaller scale. The news readily provided by the daily paper and the ever-present tube and Internet server tell of the latest domestic homicide or the rape of displaced persons. An empowered life will be a life that has a battle on its hands. There is little dispute in this: finitude is there to be faced; evil is there to be fought. In these next two chapters, I treat the two problems in turn, though I recognize that they often combine to trouble us in a given situation. I believe there is pastoral, practical wisdom in distinguishing the travail of finitude from the tragedy of moral evil. At least with the distinction in place, we will be less apt to assign guilt to finitude. We don’t need an extra burden to bear, such as trying to locate the hidden sin carrying the consequences of being a creature. In contrast, we do bear the burden of genuine guilt. I will not offer an apology for moral evil, such as seeing it as simply evidence of evolution’s choppy course. Covering for evil enhances its power. Confronting it openly, we have some chance to diminish its power. Naming evil for what it is is part of the work of overcoming it. In the dark light of these challenges, we struggle to believe. Collum McCann, a National Book Award winner for Let the Great World Spin, was asked in a reader’s guide interview if one of his novel’s most challenged characters was a person of faith. Tillie, a prostitute in the Bronx and a mother and grandmother, pleads guilty to a robbery charge in a plea deal that lets her prostitute daughter, Jazzlyn, off. Jazzlyn is killed in an automobile accident on the way home from the court appearance. Tillie eventually hangs herself in the shower in prison. The question to McCann: “Does Tillie somehow still believe?” His response: “She has to believe. Otherwise it’s completely hopeless . Even in suicide there’s a belief that she will see her daughter once more. . . . In the deep dark end, there’s no point unless we have at least a modicum of hope. We trawl our way through the darkness hoping to find a pinpoint of light.”2 McCann knows that “it’s more difficult to have...

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