Dear Alexander,
I think it's splendid that you go to this old age home and undergo shattering experiences of human life before which most of your peers slink away. When you think of the cross of Christ, you actually have the most radical case of this fundamental life-problem and also the only solution that is realistic and horrible and yet signifies a blessed denouement.
In this old age home you come in contact with many old people who are embittered, and who are at time senile. Consider always at the same time, that such sufferings and bitternesses are indeed terrible but that, then, when they no longer have anything to do with personal fault, they are more inoffensive before God and find their solution easier in eternal life than do transgressions that really constitute fault and sin, in times of good health. The Christians finds that difficult to grasp and to take seriously, but that's just the way it is. Now you ask me how God can allow so much suffering that you so palpably experience in this old age homẹ I cannot answer the question. It is unanswerable and is part of the incomprehensible mystery of God himself. It escapes us so that the hopeful acceptance of our suffering is but the concrete way in which we lovingly accept the eternal incomprehensibleness of God himself.
Man is especially the being who cannot in mind and heart rest content with what he grasps and perceives. And when he tries to reach beyond that, man failingly comes up against the incomprehensibleness of God. Then the question that poses itself is whether he can muster the improbable courage of a love that is convinced that the love of the no longer comprehensive God is man's true, and sole blessedness. In view of the real suffering in the world he can achieve this courage, of course, only from a strength that comes from God.
If you in this old age home have experienced how these old, troubled people living in close quarters can no longer muster up a courage of this kind - which does not seem difficult to your youthful idealism - then consider that these protests, complaints, resistances which seem to characterize these people at the terminus of their lives are not at all real personal happenings for which they will bear responsibility before God.
If someone, for example is pierced by a blazing hot iron, then even the holiest man screams. Only he is so confounded that he can no longer think of God, he is simply swallowed up by the torment of his pain. His love of God was actualized in the earlier phases of his life, at moments when this person, in freedom and self-possession, was alone and delivered himself to the mystery of God.
Such will often also be the case with these old people. They perhaps cannot realize any relationship to God in freedom. When you undergo the experience of watching vexed and bitter human beings who are no longer capable of praying just “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” and to die with these words, it is bound to be a bitter and difficult experience to bear in your life. Nevertheless it is an experience that must not unnerve you in a last ditch Christian optimism as to the meaning of life. Such persons have already for a long time been embraced by a silent love of God.
Karl Rahner