One year...

I was having wine with my Nina months after my dad had died. She had since begun attending Mass more frequently; I less so. She told me about how my father had pushed her to go to Mass…not in his words, but in a situation. She had been in Italy with him and wanted to see a statue of Madonna that the villagers were on pilgrimage to, but only as a tourist, not as a pilgrim.

She waited in line for hours to get to it, and when she got there, she felt bad just taking a photo and walking away, so she knelt and prayed as was expected. The moment she knelt, she said, she began to cry. The meaning and the message of the Madonna, which she could not convey, became clear to her and she felt…something.

I, on the other hand, had felt nothing. Nothing at Mass, nothing in prayer…nothing.

I told her that I didn’t understand how God could have let my father suffer through so much in the last year…he had become a paraplegic and we, his own children, literally had to wipe his ass for him…if he was so loving, so benevolent.

She looked at me and said, “But Adam…that wasn’t God. That was us. If it was God’s plan, your father would have died a year ago without going through all that.”

Sometimes, when I think I don’t understand God, I think of that…and I realize that what I don’t understand, is Man.