 I want to welcome you all to this conversation, though I will be the only one talking. I'm very happy to do this. My name, yes, is Father Tom Fitzpatrick, and I'm a member of the Jesuit community at BFU University. I thank Janet Canapa, who invited me to do this presentation, and also I thank Jessica Collingen, who has done the electronics on this whole process. I'm a novice at all of this, so this in a way is like a miracle for me, but a welcome to you all. When the possibility of doing this first came up and in conversations with Janet Canapa, the question arose, what would we call this presentation? What would be the topic of this presentation? And I came up with the phrase, where is God? And Janet liked the idea and she said, yes, where is God in this? I said, well, we don't have to add in this. I think it will be apparent. But some plots that I may present may have an overflow to other kinds of crises too than the one that we're in right at the moment in a global way. So where is God? I struggled with the title a bit because I feel it's a challenge because we're all in different places in this whole threat of the coronavirus. It's a global event, and I am in what I call splendid isolation in the Jesuit community in the center of the campus of Beapfield University. We can get out and walk around. The place is pretty much abandoned. And the Jesuit community is a very nice place to be. And I and my brother Jesuits are together. We're praying more. In ordinary times we'd all be spread out doing various things. So now we're together more. The quality of community life is really very, very good and enjoyable. So I can describe my situation as splendid isolation. We know there are those who have lost and are losing loved ones to this coronavirus. That is a whole different situation altogether. There are those who are very sick with the virus. Again, it is a very different situation. There are those who are in real, very serious economic trouble with this whole virus. That's a whole other situation. And my heart is very much in all of that, with all of the pain of people. So the topic was difficult in the sense of seeing the contrast between we and other people who are really in serious suffering with all of this. And what do I have to say? Nonetheless, we are all challenged to find God. We're all challenged to find God, no matter what our experiences are. I have the grace with all of this to think a lot, to pray a lot about it. For this conversation today, it was a delight for me to think so much about it and pray so much about it where we are finding God. And as one step along the way in my conversations this past week, I spend a lot of time as spiritual director and leading people in the Ignatian exercises, and this still continues for me through the internet. And I've raised the question this past week in lots of conversations, where do you find God in that? And these conversations themselves have been beautiful, and they will be reflected in my words today. And that in itself is a grace. That in itself is for me an experience of God breaking through in this challenge that we have. Just those conversations within this whole context. God is breaking through by us very simply talking about where is God in this, and maybe struggling with that. So I say that right from the beginning, that we're all in different places in this. And I am so deeply aware of the challenges of lots of people. In fact, in such grief and in such pain, they may not be able to reflect very calmly where is God in this. In crises, in my work with people over the years, I have found that, yes, it's often very, very difficult to ask where is God, or really even feeling abandoned in great pain and in great moments of crisis. But then upon some viewpoint, some time later, I've often heard people say, yes, I can see how God was there. And I hope this will happen really maybe to all of us that we will be able as time goes on to see how God has not abandoned us, but even in this global crisis, what has happened out of this, how God has been with us and how God has moved with us beyond. I hope that will be true to us all. I hope that will be true for people who are really in very great pain and sorrow at the present time. I'm hoping that out of these words this morning, that I would be able to say something for you, even if it's a very, very short sentence or a phrase that may catch your attention, that may be a help in your own reflection about where is God in all of this. I tell you a story. I spent many years of my working life as a judge within the Middle East, divided between Jordan and Jerusalem. Twenty years. They were very difficult years for me. They were very challenging years for me. That I survived that long is a part of the grace of God, part of the breaking through of God, in that whole mess. The difficulty for me was living in that mess of the Middle East, living all of the time with hatred and even dealing with people whose relatives had been shot and killed or tortured. That was the biggest challenge in it. I was working. I was the director and superior here of a new work of the Society of Jesus in Jordan. I was the director superior of a very well-known school of biblical studies of the Jesuits in Jerusalem, the Pontifical Biblical Institute. But within all of that time, my heart was broken by all of the pain around me. And in Jerusalem at a particular time, I was feeling very down about it all. And I did wonder. I raised the question within myself, within my own career. Okay, God, where are you in all of this? Where are you in all of this suffering, this pain, this hatred, this torture, this death? And I might carry a little dramatic story. It was spontaneous. Whether it was good for me to do it or not, I don't know. But at Mass, we had a daily Mass. We had about 30 people who came to the house for our Mass. And one day during the Mass, I said, I'm sorry. I can't pray for peace today. I said, we're praying every day. We're praying every day here in the midst of this torturous situation for peace. And nothing seemed to be happening. And my whole time in the Middle East, things didn't, they got not only better, but they got worse. And even that's been worse since I left. And where, God, are you? I don't advise that something may, it may be general, to say at Mass. We did continue to pray. I did pray for peace. But I did mention that. I'm midst of this whole question I was struggling with at the time in a very critical way. Where are you, God, in all of this? Well, there was, for me, what proved to be a spectacular grace, an intervention of God directly in the light of that question in my prayer. And it was this. I had the image of having, imagining that the conflict on one side was right here at the tip of my finger and the conflict on the other side was right here on the tip of this finger. And the intervention of God, I actually call it a vision, was this. God said to me, I am right there, right at the point of that conflict, no matter how difficult and how awful it is, I am right there at the point. So you're seeing my fingers here and my whole experience was that, yes, the whole conflict is such a physical thing. And having this kind of as a metaphor of my fingers touching one another was so much a part of this intervention of God. This was a physical coming together and right there at the ends of my fingertips, coming together like this, God is there. He's not off on the side as an observer, but God is right there where my fingers come together right in the center of the conflict. That experience, of course, I hope you can imagine, was extraordinarily powerful for me. God actually responded very significantly to me in my prayer and saying, I am right there in the middle of it. I am with you, I'm right in this mess, right in the middle of it. Now notice, okay, that was the grace. Notice that God did not say how he was there. The power and unavoidable message for me was he is there. Of course, I changed. My whole interior journey at that time and since then, now this is about 15 years or more, and since then, it's been the ongoing challenge for me of how and I haven't come to a satisfying answer, but the reflection has been immensely important for me in that the ongoing pondering how, but the center of that whole experience was I am there and I could not avoid that in a way the grace of God was extraordinarily strong, that I could not avoid that. Yes, God, you are here. I have another story that's similar to that and maybe it's a companion story a little bit later. A point I'd like to stress now is in our belief, one of the central points of our belief is the incarnation. That is the birth of Jesus. In the birth of Jesus, the Son of God is born amongst us. In the birth of Jesus, God is born amongst us. This is a profound mystery. There's a paradox here, the paradox about God being God and we being human and then now God wanting to be one of us, wanting to be like us by joining us as a help for us in our mess. So in Jesus we have God joining us. A point for our reflection today that I find again another point of very great significance for my own faith journey is that God in joining us, joins us in our pain, joins us in our suffering. There's a phrase that I like in that that God being with us is just not like a fear whether God is with us in the good times, even though joining us as a human, could he be just with us in the good times, whatever sense that would make. No, God does not join us in humans and just not a fear whether God, but he joins us in our suffering, in our pain. And joins us in our suffering and pain to the extreme. Jesus, the Son of God, God with us dies a torturous death at the hands of hateful people. I have found very great consolation in that. We aren't here even though Jesus is in such pain, but God joins us in our pain. And it's another one of those issues that is the source of an awful lot of pondering and prayer and contemplation. I never come to the end of pondering about that. I never come to a verbalization of it, of God, Jesus suffering in such an extreme way that I would never have to talk about it or think about it again. It's an ongoing source of prayer and contemplation, reflection, trying different words this way and that. God joining us to the extreme in our pain. And so I suggest that as a point out of our faith of ongoing prayer and reflection, he joins us. We are in great pain globally at the present time. God is there with us in his life. He's there with us in our pain, bringing together our pain and the pain of Jesus. We're touching one of the deepest mysteries of our faith and the mystery doesn't mean it's not unreal, no, it's as real as can be. But the mystery is we can't completely get our minds around the ongoing invitation. So as in Jerusalem, God said to me, he was right at the point of the conflict and with Jesus who has joined us in all of our pain, he's right in the center of this conflict. We are in today in the world, he's right in the center of this disease with us. He's with us deeply in our pain because joining us as humans in our pain. The next point I'd like to refer to the Psalms. These wonderful songs, these wonderful prayers in our long tradition in the Judeo-Christian tradition of our scriptures. And there are many Psalms that we can call laments. They are songs and prayers about great pain and there are two I refer to. The first one is Psalm 22. We as Christians perhaps know this Psalm amongst the ones we may most recognize is because in the Gospels, Jesus is quoted as on the cross saying the first words of this Psalm. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? This quote of the Psalm 22 appears in the Gospels. Jesus is reciting the beginning of this Psalm, just the beginning of that Psalm. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? It's a very strong lament by Jesus saying those words as an indication of the extreme pain. Not only isn't it physical, not psychological, these all alone are all of the other aspects of being publicly mocked. He's naked before his friends and his mother and added to that is this sense as a human being that God has abandoned him. So in a way, we can't imagine the pain being any more strongly described on every layer of the life of Jesus. What's interesting is, for us in my reflection today, is reading that whole Psalm, there is interspersed with this spirit, this extraordinary, if you want to call it, desolation, moments of praise. I sing your praise as one of the later lines. Okay, that's not quoted by Jesus on the cross. People who would have heard that or maybe the very, very early Christians who were Jews and seeing this written in the Gospel could easily have recalled that whole Psalm. What the point I'm making here, which again I find so powerful for myself in my faith journey, is in our Scripture or in our whole history with God and even in our whole personal journeys, the juxtaposition of pain and beauty. I sing your praise as Lord in the same Psalm that we hear, my God, my God, why have you abandoned me? The juxtaposition of pain and suffering. The juxtaposition of beauty and pain. This is very much a part of our human life. One of the reasons that Jesus, that we 2,000 years since Jesus are sitting talking like this, thinking like this, praying like this is precisely because Jesus' whole message, his whole preaching brings together beauty and pain. This is so deeply a part of who we are as human beings and now so very deeply who we are before God in our faith, before God in his love of us. The juxtaposition of beauty and pain and again it's a difficult thing for our minds to get along. But our experience is this, that our life is so often a combination of beauty and pain. It both has a spatial image there than being side by side spatially and a temporal image. One right after the other. I look upon my whole long, difficult, challenging years in the Middle East as a combination of beauty and pain. In some areas it's taken some time to appreciate that. But one very significant thing even the way I'm talking today is how that whole period has been profoundly important in my spiritual journey of who I am today in my faith, of who I am this morning speaking with you, of who I am as a preacher today, who I am as the director of the Ignatian exercises. I would not be doing all that in the way that I'm doing if it weren't for those long years of an awful lot of pain but also an awful lot of breaking through of God at that time in beauty as I already indicated in a very powerful experience. We are at the moment in a lot of pain. I will have reflections on the beauty there. But this is so very much a part of our journey we've got by the combination of juxtaposition of pain and beauty. Another story. This is the one that happened in Jerusalem also and touches the first one but also it's timely for me in this crisis that we've gone through too. And it's this. And this happened also in Jerusalem. So the previous story and this story takes place towards the end of my stay there. So I mentioned I was 20 years there. So my first part half of it was in Jordan and the second half of it was in Jerusalem. That was the timeline. So in Jerusalem now when this happened this was not too long before I actually left. Some months. And as the time I had actually asked to be relieved a few times because along the way I thought that I had nothing more to offer. But the father general asked if I would stay on. So of course I did. So this is a few months now almost 20 years that I've been in the Middle East and I was feeling down. I was feeling down because I felt a failure. Not a failure in my day to day work. I don't want to put myself down. I did some good things. Some creative things within this whole mass there. I don't want to mention that I would take too much time and would divert from the main thing. I want to save here. But nonetheless I was feeling down. I'm feeling a failure. The failure was on the level of an overall mess. I don't know what I expected I could have done in that enormous social, painful situation. But maybe I had some deep ideals that I could have been more of a help than I was. I had talked to both Israelis and Palestinians about the whole situation and the whole pain that they were in and different sides of the whole issue. So they were like once I was feeling down as the time was coming and maybe disappointed in myself and even strongly. I was praying about that. And praying I wished I could have done more. Okay, there was a powerful breaking through of God there again. When I say that God said to me, I'm not saying I actually hear these deep voiced words come through the walls and whatnot, but this is the message and the unavoidable message. What is what God unavoidable said to me? Tom, thank you. That was the total message. It was starling for me. Thank you. I had never read in my long years as a priest or as a theologian. I'm a trained theologian. I have got great theology. I've never read that anywhere or heard anyone say in retreats or books of spirituality that God thanks us. Now again, what was very significant and just similar to the other grace I mentioned to you is this, that God did not say what he was thanking me for. I'm sure that he was happy with the good things that I did do there over 20 years. But that was not verbalized. I didn't sense that that's what the grace was. The grace was simply and very, very directly. Thank you, Tom. In the meantime, again, this is another grace that's been powerful over the years for birth of flexion and prayer and stimulus and prayer. What has occurred out of that was, it is this, what God was most significantly thanking me for was that I stayed with it. I didn't give up. I didn't lose faith that I didn't lose heart. And of course that changed everything. Can we apply that here? Maybe it's easy to lose heart in this situation. Where is God? Why are you letting this happen? Lose trust. I would pray that we all could know that God thanks you for not losing trust, losing love. I'd like to just list a few specifics about graces. We can see today that's happening around us. And actually all of these that I'm going to mention again quickly came up in conversations this past week as I was talking to people about this presentation with you. The first one, kindness is pouring out everywhere. We are so very much impressed and thankful for all of the caregivers who were on the front line of this challenge of this virus, taking care of desperately and dying people heroically really. And the kindness there, these people will be challenged perhaps in the way they have never been as caregivers in such an extreme need of so many people and doing it at the danger of life themselves. Well, I say to all of you, God thanks you. This is kindness. This is love. But then all of the kindness that we see, the humanity coming out of people aware of this and concerned for one another. Beauty in many little things. And this is not an important consideration of other people in all of this. And just by following the protocols, I have a certain frustration and being isolated from people in need. But I also know that I can am charitable towards all of you and everybody else by being at the moment as far away from you. Can I say that's a gesture of kindness? I can in all of us following the protocols, the social distancing. This is an expression of kindness. Another important grace I see in this, in that it's a global issue. This is just not a local issue. It's just not a university issue. It's just not an national issue. It's a global issue. We are all united as human beings in this challenge. We're all deeper than political realities, economic realities. And I hope that one of the graces out of this will be the realization of that. As human beings, we're all vulnerable in this situation. We're all united in grief and in this common human experience. Is it unfortunate that it has to be grief that unites us all as human beings? But out of that, can we make an extension and say, yes, we are so deeply human and we get so divided in politics and economics and biases? Can this be an occasion of us realizing our faults and even our sins and the separations that we create amongst ourselves? That would be a powerful grace, a powerful bursting pool of God in all of us. Another grace, at least I can see this with lots of people that I'm in contact with forced to contemplate maybe more than we usually do on what is the meaning of this. I mentioned the numbers of conversations I've had on this issue and the conversation that we have. There is a beauty here. There is a breaking through of God right here and now and my communicating with you about this. God is present right here. So we are separated. We're following social distancing here. But in the human communication that is all broken down. In the Godly communication the distance is broken down and what a grace this is. And maybe in this and out of this we may be able to deal with issues that we found intractable. Now this will be raised all kinds of questions. But out of this do we realize what's deficient or is deficient in the way we do things? I will leave that to your own reflection because there's one final thing that I would like to say that I really would like to get to but that's not unimportant and I've thought so much about that myself and my whole work and my presence at the Earth Universe and this is the source of a lot of prayer for me now and in contemplation and I hope it will show true. The last point is this and this may seem to be a bit complicated and I've never said anything like this before and it's only a grace that's curable than the last 10 days. So I'm not sure if I'm saying this very well. First of all quickly you're so much aware of evolution and the science of evolution and really the beauty of how we have emerged out of the whole process of the universe and evolution has become an aspect of our general culture today we think in evolution that returns and we as a people, as human beings have emerged out of this whole universe with its almost 14 billion year history behind us and everything was in place out of this whole history of this universe that here we are today we would not be here today as human beings without this whole very long process every step along the way in all of what we could call have been its imperfections violence out of all of that here we are today and without that I would not be without this specific universe with all of its complexities with all of its violence its physical violence in the whole universe and all of its conflicts over centuries I am born out of this I could say yes look at all of that I could say what an imperfect universe it is with all of this ups and downs and violence but none of us view or I would not be here and God has something to say about that and let me tell you how this occurred to me again in God's words to me but it's applicable to everybody God say Tom you may think that I have created an imperfect universe I'm not going to discuss that with you that's not my point today what I am telling you that I love you so much that it's taken this whole universe with all of its apparent imperfections to bring you forth and this is the universe I chose because I wanted you you would not be in the way you are and the person I wanted without this whole process with all of its imperfections I love you so much I have wanted you so much this is the universe in which I do that this is the universe in which I love I'm very happy to have been with you today we're on a journey, we're all on the journey together there's a lot of pain a lot of pain there is a lot of beauty let God break through