Thank you for this insight - I am blessed. My own departure point is heavily vested in Simone Weil’s beautiful explanations, so I find connection with God-under-a-tree and God-on-a-cross as icons of God in solidarity with all the suffering and what Weil calls affliction.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl famously wrote: “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

My question then becomes a cosmological one: Why did God “subject creation to futility, not willingly but in hope”?