My dad loved his mother. She was the saving grace in a home full of pain and suffering. Her death profoundly influenced my dad. He became agnostic for a while because of it. He had prayed fervently day and night for her healing but despite his prayers, she died.

My dad could not reconcile this with God. I consider how many people I have met who have hated speaking or thinking about God because of an unanswered prayer. We cry out and silence is too terrible to handle. 

Silence is always incredibly painful. The silence of not getting the job you want. The silence of barrenness. The silence of no cure for cancer. The silence of the grave. 

Dad had to experience the transforming power of hope before he could experience faith. I am not sure fully what sparked a flame of hope for Dad. I think it was reading Augustine in the campus library in Fairbanks, Alaska. Dad resonated with the logic of Christianity. He found it extremely practical to the maladies of the human condition. As he read, he found hope and as he found hope he found faith and faith led to forgiveness and this led to love. 

There is a stark and painful painting of the death of Christ. “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb” by Hans Holbein the Younger is one of the most haunting and powerful religious paintings of the Renaissance. Created around 1520–1522. There is no comfort in the painting. Christ looks grisly, in decay, and beyond resurrection.