Since the beginning of the pandemic, and the upheaval of the last few years, I keep coming across a message often repeated: There is nothing to worry about. God is in charge. For those who find comfort in that, I don’t want to strip anything away. Hope is a thing the world doesn’t need less of.

What I do know, though, is for some the idea that God is in charge falls short. It falls short for me. If He’s in charge of this world we are in, He certainly has some explaining to do.

Elie Wiesel, in his famous book Night, writes about his experience in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. Perhaps the most famous passage in his story pertains to the death of a young boy, executed by the Nazis. Lighter than the two men he was killed alongside, he languishes for half an hour in front of those assembled. Wiesel writes someone behind him kept repeatedly murmuring, “Where is God? Where is God?” while they stood and watched the scene unfold.

Inside him, Wiesel writes of a voice inside him, giving a quiet, personal response. “Where is He? This is where – hanging here from this gallows.”

Often this passage is interpreted to mean that Wiesel is writing about the death of God. The collapse of his idea that God is in control, and the surrender of his thinking that our suffering happens for some greater reason. What purpose could be worth the most difficult death of this boy and the thousands like him?

Once, in trying to find my own way, a parish priest, Fr. Dan Krettek, recommended to me the book Finding God in Troubled Times. The book’s author, Rev. Richard Hauser, SJ, writes about this passage, and saw it differently than most interpreters. For Hauser the passage evokes parallels to the crucifixion of Christ, and reminds us that being on the gallows is the only place God can be.

Where is God? He is with us, even in our suffering.

The thought has often been a comfort to me, and often one I struggle to translate to those I care about.

A lot of the times, when we tell folks that God is in charge, we do so with instruction on not being worried or afraid. I’ve never been sure why this is, though I recognize that sometimes “bucking up” is exactly what we need to do. But there are other times when the folks we love could be reminded that before Christ’s crucifixion He was so anxious He sweated blood and on the cross uttered the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Sometimes, as a poor Catholic, I find consolation in that, and a strange sense of purpose, and a reminder that I am not alone.