Words so often seem meaningless when faced with such a devastating tragedy as was visited upon the close-knit community of Inishowen this week. In an accident of catastrophic proportions, eight men, seven of them in their teens or early twenties, were cruelly killed. While people are now convulsed in a mixture of sadness and disbelief, inevitable questions arise about the circumstances surrounding the accident. After every such tragedy there is a lot of focus on the need for more care and attention on our roads and the need for an increased culture of road safety awareness.
When the inevitable media coverage of yet another weekend of road carnage in Donegal dies down, long and difficult questions will remain. It will be the community around Clonmany and Buncrana, already overburdened by the cruel toll taken on their friends and families in previous road accidents, who will be left to pick up the pieces.
Eight men have lost their lives. Eight families have been devastated beyond repair. A community has been robbed of talent and vitality.
As a community of faith, Christians are left to ask difficult questions of one another when faced with such immense human tragedy but to also question what our faith has to say about such heartbreaking devastation.
Whether in the pleading of the Jewish people to their God to put an end to the Holocaust during World War II, or a heartbroken mother's painful 'why' as she lays her son to rest, or a family starving to death on a lonely and desolate African plain, the question of human suffering is one that has taxed the greatest of religious and philosophical minds.
Why does God permit such cruel tragedies to visit families and communities? Obviously there is the moral evil in the world that leads people to murder one another or crazed fanatics to mastermind genocide, but what of the random nature of suffering? The car accident, the newborn baby struck by leukaemia before the wealth of life dawned on him?
Some people, well-intentioned but glibly, dismiss such tragedies as God's will. ''Only the good die young,'' people will often say when faced with the death of a young person. But, such platitudes are widely off-the-mark. It is impossible to square such a vision of God with the all-loving, ever-merciful God of Christianity who revealed himself in Christ and through the Sacred Scriptures. Who would seek to know such a monstrous God who would so cruelly punish a family, never mind enter in to a relationship with Him?
No, God does not will human suffering; such a concept of God is a purely human construct and one that has done immense damage to people of faith.
If there is any good to be found in suffering (though it is not a good in and of itself), it is in the fortitudinous capacity of individuals, families and communities to rally and overcome apparent unbearable suffering. From unspeakable tragedy have come some of the greatest triumphs in human history. For people of faith, this is the proof that God has overcome sin, evil and death, that there is light after darkness and that suffering does not have the final word.
