THE
GOD OF THE TSUNAMI (2004)
What
with all the ongoing media attention to the tsunami, I
vowed weeks ago to leave the topic alone. But I’m intrigued
by a rash of “Where was God” editorials, with commentators
inquiring how a supreme being could have allowed thousands
to die in such a manner. I’m sure this religious tangent
has been inspired at least in part by the queasy feeling
that Gaian glitches can hit anywhere, any time. According
to writer Tom Bissell, the idea that geo-catastrophes are
something that only happens “to primitive peoples in
far-off lands“ is mistaken. In a 2003 article for
Harper’s
Magazine, he call
it “a highly callous form of disaster denial, for
yesterday's village-erasing lava flow in Sumatra is
tomorrow's super-eruption in British Columbia.“
It seems to me that when disaster strikes on such a scale,
the “Where Was God” question is insoluble, unless you go
the atheist route and insist the question has a faulty
premise. If you believe in a personal deity, you are left
with two options, both of them less than satisfactory. One
is a Captain Kirk-like creator, who follows the Prime
Directive and stays out of minor messes on a little planet
in an average galaxy. The second option is God as a
practitioner of tough love, sending thousands to their
deaths as part of a cosmic plan we cannot understand but is
ultimately to our benefit.
The
puzzle has a long pedigree. On the morning of November 1,
1755, Father Manual Portal awoke from a nightmare in which
Lisbon was destroyed in an earthquake. He went to mass and
prayed. A few hours later his monastery was in ruins, just
as he had dreamed, writes Otto Friedrich in his history of
apocalyptic beliefs, The End of the World. “Tens of
thousands of pious citizens were on their knees in their
Churches on the All Saints’ Day of 1755, listening to the
familiar exhortations to rejoice in praise of their Lord,
when they felt the first faint shuddering of the earth
beneath them.”
The earthquake was centered just offshore of Portugal, but
it caused tremendous damage hundreds of miles inland, with
vast numbers unknowingly scheduled for burial in church
rubble. So where was God? Wasn’t he listening to the
prayers at moment the earthquake struck, and if so, what
kind of a response was this?
The
Book of Job is all
about one man’s encounter with mind-bendingly bad personal
disasters, unaware it’s all part of a wager between God and
Satan to test his faith. St. Augustine’s
The City of God was
inspired by the author’s struggle with how Rome could have
fallen to the barbarians AFTER if was Christianized. As for
the vast corpus of theological hairsplitting, from Saint
Jerome to papal encyclicals, much of it can be read as
legalistic responses to Christ’s questioning cry at
Golgotha: “Why has thou forsaken me?”
So when mediamakers or anyone else plays the WWG card in
response to a natural disaster, it usually means conceptual
twists and turns worthy of an Escher print. The Roman
Catholic Church has been there before.
Death from natural disasters is always worst for the
living. The dead are gone, and if you believe that means
nonexistence, then they are in no position to mourn -
unlike the survivors, who have to pick up the pieces,
physically and emotionally. But if the dead have gone off
into an afterlife, all the better for them, and survivors
even may have reason for envy. Suffering is inescapable in
life; that’s Buddha’s First Noble Truth. It’s no accident
that Buddhism and Hinduism, the religions of impermanence
and transformation, took hold in monsoon-beleaguered
Southeast Asia. The Buddhist Sutras, and Vedic texts like
the Bhagavad
Gita, have
much to say about accepting change.
As far as individual death goes, a dinky flash of
consciousness in an eternity of darkness is not much of a
story, and I suspect there’s a lot more to it. To alter
Einstein slightly, the light beneath appearances is subtle,
but It’s not malicious. Human beings address it in prayer,
beckon to it with music, target it with particle
accelerators and observatories, and stumble after it with
the butterly net of words and the mason jar of theory.
Source with a capital S is intuited all over the world by
the incurably curious, whether they’re from science,
religion, or the arts. The approach may be different in
each field of endeavour, but the universal feeling of a
connection to something vastly bigger than the self
suggests something real as inspiration.
What is it? Don’t know. Does it ever listen? Beats me.
So I will leave the WWG debate to the appointed experts. My
sympathies are more with the poets and other fools who
believe life is not so much a problem to be solved as a
mystery to be lived.
Geoff Olson
