The painting is part of a mural by Thomas Hart Benton and depicts the movie industry in America. The film industry has absolutely nothing - Nothing! - to do with this post. However, yesterday I was thinking about something my friend in the film industry said and I had a sudden enlightenment of the Sunset-Boulevard-type { "Lights! Camera!.... All right, Mr. DeMille. I'm ready for my enlightenment!"}, and this is how I remember things as they all come together like rushes from weeks and months of shooting film and trying now to edit it into something coherent.
There were a lot of important words in that paragraph, but I won't talk about them now. Now I have to talk about things that occurred to me while I was running this morning.
The question posed in the title, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is but another form of the question whether God is silent or loquacious.
When things are going our way, I notice that people tend to believe God is loquacious: He is telling us the right road to take, the right course to major in, the right investments for our money, and we frequently find ourselves in the end-zone and dropping to one knee with hosannas on our lips.
When we suffer, God seems silent, on holiday, like your lawyer who won't return your calls while the lawyers of the enemy have nothing else to do but badger you, yet is everyday chatter, when we are bubbly and happy, when all we have to do is turn on the cable TV and get a few doses of God's advice to everyone from the lovelorn to the politically inept.
In Martin Scorsese's film Silence there is long meditation on divine silence.
So which one is it?
(I believe it is both; it is a superposition of states.)
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