My little sister writes me tonight from her office and says she cannot reconcile the divine to the suffering she sees in the world. Here she makes a point so well-considered and prevalent among intelligent people I encounter it nearly every time I have a deep discussion with anyone.

I still try to justify my own view on the matter – very comfortable for me but nearly indefensible when presented to other people. By far my greatest source of suffering has revolved closely around the fact of my child's chronic illness and the need to fold him firmly and finally into my daily life without any resentment.

But something took hold for me in my early Catholic years among the Jesuits. The doctrine of free will made immediate sense to me. It was not something I needed to profess without being able to claim it. It was not doctrinaire, feeling practical as hell right from the start. The mere fact of being created and let loose in an imperfect world has always seemed liberating and inevitable. Those are the same properties I recognize in a great work of art – and we are great art. For me that is a comforting reflection at the worst of times, and an exhilaration when times are good.

Suffering, the great common experience of all living things, dovetails perfectly with the doctrine of free will and a wild created universe acting on its own in time and space. The nuns spoke to me from my earliest years in grade school about the place of personal suffering in the Mystical Body of Christ, emphasizing that whatever I endured could be added to the collective and gave strength to the whole of human experience. I guess I have to say after all the years as a lapsed formal Catholic, after failed marriages, lost friendships, disappointments large and small, an aging body with its attendant miseries and outright betrayals, this remains vividly true for me. The strange business of collective pain and the wonder of it, the possibility for transcendence, that is all still working for me.