If God is Being itself — if there is nothing that is not this one happening — then the one happening includes the tumor ward. It includes the camps, the famines, the sea that took a quarter of a million people in one morning, the predation wired into nature itself, every cruelty the dream has ever acted out. No washing of the word rinses this out. A god who is a being could at least be put on trial for it; Being itself offers no office where the complaint can be delivered. The oldest book of the wounded demanded exactly that trial — a man on an ash heap, everything taken, calling the maker of the universe to account — and the answer he got, you will remember, was no answer. It was a whirlwind: the universe itself, vaster and stranger than the question, speaking out of the storm. And somehow — this is in the text, and it has enraged philosophers ever since — the man was satisfied. Not answered. Satisfied.

I will not pretend to do better than the whirlwind. No one has, and you should walk away from anyone who claims to. The witnesses do not explain the horror. What they do — and it is in the record so consistently that you must weigh it — is refuse to retract in the face of it. The woman who wrote all shall be well, the most quoted consolation in the language, wrote it in a plague city, anchored to a church wall, with the death-carts passing under her window. The young woman who wrote life is glorious and magnificent wrote it in a transit camp, weeks before the train took her east; she knew where the train went. The testimony this book is made of comes disproportionately from the burned. And some of the burned — I must tell you this too — came back silent, or broken, or with their faith in pieces; that is in the record as well. But the ones who went all the way down kept surfacing with the same impossible report: that the water, at the very bottom, was still this. Still the one thing. Still — they all reach for the word, and reach for it shaking — love.

I cannot tell you why the ocean storms. I can only show you who the witnesses are, and where they were standing when they testified.