In fact there is nothing unusual here. So far God has prevented the deaths, in Catholic teaching, of possibly exactly one of the faithful (the Blessed Virgin Mary). All others have died, including himself. Had the family been asked beforehand: do you think your religious ritual will protect you from fire? they would have said ‘no’. So as I understand it, as an unbeliever, there is nothing special to explain.
I completely agree with what Hokomai is saying here. The story is so sad, and I can see that people who know this family will cry out “why God, why?” As someone far away, my first reaction was, “How terribly sad - if only that person hadn’t made the terrible judgement to leave the candle burning.” Really, if you watch the news (which I don’t, usually) you will find story after story of terrible things happening - especially fires - to good people. We don’t always cry out in agony to God, because we don’t know the beauty that was in THAT person’s soul, and we don’t know what wonderful thing THAT person might have done the night before they died. I don’t mean to trivialize your reaction to this incident, but while these people may have been special, it is hard to examine the lives of others who were tragically cut short and to say, “well I can see why they deserved this.”
And so…
What remains to explain is pain and suffering itself, and why it happens to the innocent, including animals and very young children.
I think this is really the question that is being asked. Hokomai, not being a believer him (her?) self, gave 2 possible reasons that a Christian might come up with:
- he is not all-powerful “can’t interfere in free will etc”, which fails to answer the objection, or
- that there is a ‘mystery’ about his love, which means it all comes right in the end, despite the fact we can’t understand it, which is a variation of ‘I don’t know’.
- I, as a believer, would add the third reason that tragedies in our world happen according to the basic natural law. Every action has a reaction. A bad person comes at a good person with a knife, natural law does not allow a forcefield to be raised around the good person; the good person’s body is penetrable like any others. A candle is left burning too close to a wall, and as happens with fire, a spark might fly, and as happens with flammable materials, drywall might ignite…It is simply the natural law that has been operating since the day Adam and Eve took the apple.
This may not be the way the earth was originally created to run - perhaps the natural law would be different had sin not corrupted it. Humans wouldn’t die, that’s for sure. But God allows us to make choices freely, and he chooses NOT to interfere with the natural law most of the time. I believe that this is because if he chose to intervene everytime, then there would be no consequence of our sin, and there would be no way for people to choose to love him despite the hardship, because there would be no hardship. It’s why he gave Adam and Eve free will in the first place, and why he allowed them to experience the consequences of their choice when they chose wrong. He wants us to love him freely, which necessarily requires that we can also choose not to.
I have certainly wondered why God didn’t say, “ok, let’s kill off Adam and Eve and have a do-over.” or why he allowed all of salvation history to play out the way it did (think of the suffering of the Israelites for all of those years before the savior came), and why after Jesus saved us, it still wasn’t like “poof, now we’ll go back to the way it was before the fall.” Again, I do believe it has to do with free will allowing us to choose wrong or right so that when we choose God, the reward for us, and the love he gets from us, is sweeter.
I know that God does intervene against natural law sometimes. There are miracles. In my children’s religion course, they have to memorize the answer to the question, “Why did Jesus perform miracles?” The answer (at their level) is, “because he felt sorry for people, and because he wanted to show them that he was God.” So we see in catechesis, that the miracles that God performs have a calculated purpose. And Jesus didn’t heal every sick person, raise every good dead person from the dead, etc… Certainly, he allowed some people in his vicinity to suffer and die, and chose his miracles for a reason. In modern times, he has his reasons why he chooses to performs miracles certain times and not others - and these, for sure, are a mystery. One thing to consider is that we don’t truly know that he didn’t intervene. We don’t know what good might come of this terrible tragedy. I have wondered in the past, if a child who died young, was assured salvation, and if it was possible that God knew that that child was going to turn away from him in later years, and lose salvation. The same might be true of an adult. What is the other path that might happen if this didn’t? Was it definitely worse? What would that child and adult say to us from heaven about it? What other forms of intervention is God providing in our lives, or in the lives of those who loved the victims that we might not see right now?
None of this erases the terrible tragedy that this was, or makes the pain of those who loved them go away. But it reminds me that ultimately, I am not the judge of God and his decisions, and that I have to trust that his love and his miracles (or lack of miracles) are perfectly placed, in a way that I am simply not capable of understanding. I am after all, not God.
