pril," wrote T. S. Eliot, "is the cruelest month." September, July, January (all the others, actually) are wretched too. Cruelty's not diurnal, nor suffering cyclical, like the moon's skull. Grief knows no lull, and maybe it's the accumulated haze of our cries (and not hydrocarbons) that causes the stars to flicker at night. The more people, the more pain: the correlation's impeccable.

For atheists and secularists, pain is just part of the progression, the inevitable side effects of an evolving species (like fumes to the internal combustion engine). No doubt secularists and atheists are appalled by pain, death, and loss, as is the Christian; they just have no problem explaining them.

In contrast, it's the Christian-with his or her all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God-who cringes to fit even one child dying of AIDS, or of cancer, or of fire into the gentle palm of a loving heavenly Father, only to see that child crushed by titanic fingers.

I can't answer these questions, at least not with any more precision than what the great controversy motif-broad, universal, and all-encompassing-allows, but here's a thought that helps me to live, at least for now, with the angst of the unanswerable:

As humans, we experience only our own pain, only our own suffering, never anyone else's. No matter how closely tied to others, we can never splice into their nerves in order to feel a prick of their pain or a spasm of their woe. Whatever we feel for others, we feel it only in ourselves, only as ourselves. Other people's pain comes to us only, and always, as our own.

When thousands of people starved to death in an African famine, each individual mother, each individual father, each individual child, suffered only as an individual can suffer, feeling no more pain than an individual can feel. Though we are appalled at the staggering numbers of the worst human tragedies, in the end, no one among all these numbers to the left of the decimal point has ever suffered as anything other than a single digit. Whether crushing out the life of two people or 2 million, pain remains finite, hedged in always by what's as minuscule and as evanescent as the human. We know no more suffering than our personal metabolism allows, no more pain than our delirious cells can carry; the moment the threshold gets crossed, death cracks it off.

Only one exception exists to this otherwise pandemic personalization of pain-and that's Jesus on the cross, God in humanity carrying in Himself the pain and suffering of humanity. At Calvary the miseries of the entire world were, one by one, added up-and the gruesome sum fell on the Creator, God Himself, in the person of Jesus.

"Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows" (Isa. 53:4). That's all our griefs, that's all our sorrows, and they fell on the Lord Himself, who suffered more than any human being could ever suffer, because we can experience only our own pain, only our own suffering, while at the cross God experienced it all!

Here's the point: Human suffering comes from just one source, sin; and at the cross the sins of the world-and all the grief, wrath, and desolation inherent in those sins-honed in on Jesus, who as God endured the cumulative weight of them all. No matter how bad our suffering, or how many gigabytes of wide-eyed corpses on the evening news are crudely hewed in pixels across our consciousness, whatever we feel, either for ourselves or for others, we feel only as individuals. In contrast, God, on the cross, felt it all. At Calvary the Lord linked Himself to us through the essence of our humanity, that is, through our pain, only the level He experienced was greater and more intense than that which any other human being has ever known.

In the end, whatever moral freedom has cost humanity, it cost God more. And as I watch grief sculpt away without anesthesia the face of humanity (after all, it's the pain that does the hewing), the thought that the pain we know individually God knew corporately, though hardly resolving all the questions, helps me live with the angst of the unanswerable, even through the cruelest months.

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.