When Jesuit priest Fr Richard Leonard’s older sister was left quadriplegic after a freak car accident at Wadaye in the Northern Territory in 1988, he and his family were looking for answers as to why such suffering had befallen them.
His sister, Tracy – who has written her own book on life before the accident and her work with the Missionaries of Charity called The Full Catastrophe – was being towed after a breakdown in her four-wheel drive, at dusk, at 10km an hour. She was returning tribal women to their home when the car accidentally skidded and slammed into a tree.The other three people in the vehicle came out unscathed but Tracy did not.His own mother, a daily communicant, on seeing her 28-year-old daughter lose all feeling in her limbs after the accident, was left wondering how could God do this to them.
This extraordinary experience led Fr Richard, 20 years later to write a book – Where the Hell is God? – on where people can find God in pain and suffering. The book also aims to help people who are suffering to make sense out of their experience.
It is deliberately simple, short and accessible he said, and is delivered not in deep theological terms but with a lighter touch.
“We’re in the area of speculative theology, the Church can’t be definitive,” he told The Record in an interview earlier that day.
He stressed that his conclusions in relation to God, pain and suffering in the book were not Church dogma.
They were merely his own speculations drawn from the early Church’s image of the Good Shepherd, and personal questions and experiences he has wrestled with over time, which people are free to take or leave.
Ordained in 1993, Fr Richard said he first started talking about tragedy and suffering in Perth at John XXIII College in 2000 and since then has been exploring, developing and reflecting on the meaning of suffering and God.
Fr Richard distinguished between the active will of God and the passive where God permits evil that good may come from it.
The point of suffering is that we grow through suffering, he said, which has been a long tradition of the Church.
“But that’s very different to saying God wants it to happen,” he said.
After his sister’s accident, floods of letters from well-intentioned friends came pouring in offering consolation but the theology in their kindness was not so comforting for the family.
The family received a number of letters saying that Tracy had done something terrible in her life and that God was punishing her here, that she might merit heaven.
Another strand of consolation came by way of suggesting that by Tracy’s suffering, she was “sending big building blocks to heaven and was going to have a mansion in the sky”. Fr Richard said that Heaven was where we’re meant to be eternally happy with God, and that there wasn’t economy and first class in Heaven.
And while believing in God’s justice he doesn’t think that we suffer because God wants us to send building blocks to heaven.
Another piece of consolation – “a lock stock piece of Irish theology” – the Leonard family was told was that “God only sends the biggest crosses to those who can bear them”.
They were told how blessed they were, but not feeling particularly blessed, this made them feel guilty, he said.
The fourth group of letters sent to the family said that God was a mystery and they would never know the reason they had been sent this suffering.
Fr Richard also deals with finding God’s will in our lives.
“I believe passionately in finding God’s will in our lives, but in the big picture not in the small,” he said, referring to daily occurrences like choosing the route to work.
He recommended moving away from a “blueprint theology” – that says that God has a plan for me and I have to find out what it is – and moving towards finding out how to be “the most faithful, the most hopeful, the most loving person possible” which God asks of all believers.
He said that God accompanies us in the discernment process to discover how we’re going to live that out given our context, time and talents.