God in the Tsunami?

Last updated on: January 8, 2005 at 3:11 am by Fr. Joseph Huneycutt

God in the Tsunami? 2005-01-08T03:11:00-06:00 Fr. Joseph Huneycutt

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Reading Tsunami op-ed pieces from London is like a breath of fresh air:

1) they don’t hesitate to mention God (the Incarnate one)

2) they’re fearless of questions that we Americans are too naive to ask, much less answer

3) being a creedal Christian culture, though few go to church, their opinions and articles are spiked with traditional Christian terms and jargon (which is obviously woven into the fabric of the culture)

For example, in a piece by Frank Johnson, entitled “Satan is always trying to pick up Left-wing and liberal support,” we read:

During the ages of Christian belief, most people would not have thought the tsunami was evidence of God’s non-existence. In paradise, tsunamis did not happen. But God peopled paradise with men and women. He could have kept them in a state in which they would have been unconscious of bad, but then we would only have been mute animals.

God raised them above the beasts by giving them a choice between good or bad. So they had to know what bad was, including in the natural world around them. The moment they became capable of being bad, the natural world became capable of it, too.

Mankind’s acquisition of the ability to choose is symbolised by Eve’s eating from the tree of knowledge – the knowledge of good and evil. “Forth-reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat,” says Milton’s Paradise Lost. But significantly the poem adds: “Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe”

From the above, it will be gathered that I have no trouble with God and the tsunami, and I believe that millions do not either. The trouble is with archbishops and others, who assume that, in a secular age, we cannot take it.

Then there is a piece by Charles Moore, also in the Telegraph, which is a MUST READ.

One of my pet peeves is when folks say, “We’re all children of God.” We are not. The traditional Christian understanding is that, through Christ, we become so by the Father’s adoption. In that spirit, a few excerpts …

If God loves us, it is asked, why did He let tens of thousands of innocent people die in this catastrophe?

One traditional answer, no longer popular in the West, is that humanity deserves it. When Jim Callaghan was home secretary, dealing with the sudden explosion of conflict in Ulster in the late 1960s, he had an argument with the young Protestant firebrand, Ian Paisley. “After all,” said Callaghan, in a conciliatory tone, “we are all children of God.” “No, we are not,” replied the Reverend Doctor. “We are all children of wrath.” A similar belief has been expressed by some Muslim clerics in regions affected by the disaster: the tsunami is God’s judgment on our wickedness, they have claimed, the result of His justified anger. From earliest times, people detected divine fury in the weather. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Flood is caused by gods in a rage at the ever-increasing noise floating up to Heaven from all those gabby people on Earth.

This is not, naturally, a view that appeals to the Church of England. In the latest Sunday Telegraph, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams would not even contemplate the suggestion that there could be anything punitive about such death. And he was extremely reluctant to find excuses for his boss. He suggested that “making sense” of such disasters was almost insulting to those affected by them. Dr Williams’s piece has been unfairly maligned: most of it seemed to me true and subtle, and I was particularly struck by his point that “those most deeply involved… are so often the ones who spend least energy in raging over the lack of explanation”.

Ain’t that the truth! In the past few weeks I’ve heard Westerners on the radio saying that this tragedy has now caused them to doubt the existence of God. But, those who’ve survived the horrors — not just this one but other personal tragedies as well — are more wont to praise God for mercy and preservation.

A friend of mine who almost drowned in the Maldives on Boxing Day speaks only of his good fortune, of the woman who saved his life, of how well fellow tourists and hotel staff behaved. One of his party died, but this makes him feel humble, guilty and sad, not angry against his creator. He says he learnt to pray better.

Don’t get me wrong, I absorb the pampering. But perhaps we in the West have grown too pampered by our lush, painless, and — for all intents and purposes — seemingly deathless living?

Talk about God can only be by analogy. The most familiar is of the father. The father helps bring his child into the world. By doing so, he gives it the chance of everything good it will ever receive. But at the same time, he also condemns his child to life, with everything horrible that will happen to it, and, eventually, to death. Is he therefore wrong to do so?

A less common analogy is with a creative artist. In his creation, the artist includes cruelty and suffering. Shakespeare has the innocent Desdemona killed unjustly; he bumps off the loving Cordelia; he sends Hamlet off the rails. This does not lead the reader to think that Shakespeare himself is cruel, only that the cruelty is necessary to the art. If God is the artist of the world, of everything that is, the suffering of the people He has created is no more to be criticised than that created by the playwright. It is tragic, yes, but tragedy is a word for a form of art, the highest form of art. In the Christian account, God did not absent Himself from the tragedy of His own creation, but, through becoming man, became part of it. So even if the whole thing is a ghastly mistake, it is one for which the author has paid the highest price.

[Above emphasis mine.]

Sorry, Moore’s article is too good to not read in its entirety [H E R E]. But for those just scanning it here, here’s the ending …

Yet even these ways of speaking come out too pat. They may be right, but they do not answer the question of what human suffering feels like. The near-universal experience of people who have come close to death – in war, through illness, in accidents or natural disaster – is that they have contemplated something that is true. The truth has been so terrible – by which I mean not bad, but inspiring of terror – that the experience of it proves almost incommunicable. People often emerge feeling that they now understand more about life, with the paradoxical result that they have less to say about it.

In this respect, the encounter with death is very like the encounter with God. The Book of Job remains by far the greatest account of man’s suffering in the face of his creator. God lets Satan persecute Job precisely because he is “perfect and upright”, so that everyone may know the incalculable distance between the ways of God and those of man. When God finally speaks to Job, it is to tell him how little he knows, how puny he is: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?”, “Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea?”, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?”. It is only when Job accepts that he knows nothing that he begins to know something: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.”

This story is terrible and true, like a great tempest. It is not an accident, surely, that when the Lord speaks to Job, He does so “out of the whirlwind”.

Thanks to News Forum links.

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