Yes, the question is about the choice that Adam and Eve made. They made a wrong choice, and evil came to be in the world. At the same time now that evil has come to be, people are suffering its consequences, which is absolutely right. What does all of this mean? Well, again, a related question could be: Why does God not remove all evil from the world? And it goes back to what I’ve just said about putting severe limitations on freedom and limiting the potential of creation.

We experience the effects of evil, but we are not obligated to propagate it. So even though evil exists in the world, we are called to oppose it actively, not be passive agents in the world, but to oppose evil, to bring evil down in the world—not because we think we can do it because we are the creators now; not that kind of thinking. Or not because, if we’re all nicer and all better, the world will be a better place. We already know that’s actually not true; we have enough history to prove it, that a humanistic approach to the world is not going to make the world a paradise.

But nevertheless, while we suffer the consequences of evil, the difference here is that we are not called to be simply passive victims. We are called through God’s grace to reverse evil. So let’s bring an example here into the discussion. In an extended sense, illness is one of the outcomes of evil, one of the consequences. Lots of people get ill; lots of innocent people get ill. Children get ill; little children are ill.

We feel the tragedy of this when we see it. We understand it’s profoundly unjust—something wrong with that picture, profoundly wrong. When we see it, it stirs us because we understand that there’s something wrong here. Well, for us, we could be victims of evil, passive victims of evil, or we could appeal to God to re-create it in our lives, to turn it around, to do something else.

So the person who is ill prays for the grace to bear the illness well and to be sanctified through it. It’s not the path you and I would always choose, but imagine somebody who is in constant pain. Of course, we should, in our efforts to oppose evil, use all the means we have at our disposal—medical means—to limit or eliminate pain. Of course we should; that’s part of a proper therapeutic treatment. But we know there are cases where it’s just not possible to do that.

If the person who is in constant pain, for example, reached the point in the spiritual life of allowing that to be a constant reminder to be in communion with God, that person is, through God’s grace, re-creating an evil and refusing to be a passive victim, not simply by not perpetrating evil, by not imposing it on others—which is obvious, that we ought not to propagate evil—but even asking God for the grace for evil to be re-created where we encounter it, where we encounter tragedies, where we encounter pain and illness, that we ask God for somehow for that to be turned around for his glory. In this way, we are being priestly with it: we are taking something which is foreign to God’s creation, offering it back, and saying, “We’re not competent ourselves to re-create this, even though it is actually the effects of what we do.”

Notice I said “what we do” and not simply “what Adam and Eve did,” because evil, we must recognize, continues because of what you and I do! It’s easy enough to pin it all on them. Why is there evil? Because you and I do it, that’s why there is evil, and that’s why it’s perpetuated. So we seek, of course, first and foremost, not to perpetuate it, but then when we are faced with the possibility of becoming victims of it, that it be turned around in our own lives, not as a glorification of evil, not as a glorification of pain, not as a glorification of illness—God forbid!—but as a way to turn them around for something good so that starts as evil is refashioned, reoriented, transformed into something that moves in another direction.