ACTS OF GOD
by Forrest Church
January 9, 2005
In Sri Lanka and Malaysia, in Thailand, Indonesia and India, as the emotional aftershocks begin to take their toll, comes the inevitable question, "Why?" As put by one aid worker to a Roman Catholic bishop in the Sri Lankan city of Batticcaloa—2,500 people died there, tens of thousands were left homeless—"How can a loving God allow this to happen?" According to Wall Street Journal reporters Karen Mazurkewich and Geoffrey Fowler, who recounted this conversation, the Bishop stood mute. Finally, he admitted, "This disaster has shaken my faith." Many of his flock were pondering the same mystery. "Everyone wants to know why did this happen to us, and at this level of magnitude," Bishop Swampilaii admitted to his questioner. "This was unimaginable."
Natural and unnatural catastrophes alike turn all of us into theologians. Not the kind of theologian who labors in the isolation of his study, reckoning the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin, but the kind who has been slapped against the wall by reality, for whom anything but hardscrabble truth is an unaffordable luxury. Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and knowing we must die. Knowing we must die, we can't help but question what life and death means. Whenever we choose or are forced to pose such questions, we become theologians. We ask ultimate questions. We challenge the nature of reality with the reality of our own experience.
Not all amateur theologians are believers. When the bottom falls out of the world, when a mighty wave slaps the life out of everyone they love, leaving them bereft and alone amidst the ruins, some believers challenge the nature of reality with the reality of their own experience and lose their faith. "This disaster has shaken my faith," the bishop dared to confess. Of course it has. Look for a loving God in the eye of a hurricane or riding the crest of a Tsunami and, baring the most inhumane twists of logic imaginable, you will look in vain.
In fact, if such a God exists, then God is a bastard. The traditional Western God—the Hebrew, Christian and Muslim God, Lord of Heaven and Earth, all knowing and all powerful, the Deus ex machina driving human history, treating men and women as wanton boys treat flies—is either a bastard or a sturdy figment of our theological imagination.
Whenever someone boasts to me they don't believe in God, I ask them to tell me a little about the God they don't believe in, because I probably don't believe in him either. I simply can't believe in any God who, on the day after Christmas, would choose to rip the earth asunder, welling the tide to life-crushing heights, and then, with his all seeing eye, watch it crash down on more than a thousand beaches to claim more than 100 times that many souls. Tens of thousands of orphans. As many heart-shattered widows, widowers and parents combing snapshots for a last look at their loved ones. Most of them poor to begin with, now impoverished beyond all measure. However insurance companies may choose to define them, whatever Acts of God may be for actuarial purposes, the one thing Acts of God surely are not is acts of God.
Orthodox and fundamentalist believers would disagree, of course. For them, were we to strip the divine of ultimate responsibility for everything that happens, God would not be God. For this very reason, earthquakes play a major role in salvation history. Listed among the signs of the end times in the Book of Revelation, throughout Christian history earthquakes and floods are cited time and again as natural proof texts for the Second Coming of Christ. The Pentecostal movement in American traces its beginnings to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (8.25 on the Richter Scale, leaving 700 dead and 250,000 homeless). One lucky local evangelist predicted an imminent terrible sign of God's judgment just one week before it happened. Soon his mission house—called AZUSA (A to Z or alpha to omega USA)—was overflowing with new converts speaking in tongues and testifying to the glorious presence of the Holy Spirit. Alleluia, indeed! No doubt some itinerant preacher is gaining converts in South East Asia even as I speak, presenting manifest evidence of God's wrath, calling the survivors, themselves already victims, to repent their sins before it is too late. Such logic, if brutal, is simple. If God did this, God must be angry. If I lost my loved ones, then I must have done something wrong or they must have done something wrong for God to punish us so severely.
We follow this logic almost instinctively when something terrible happens to us. To find higher meaning in that which has destroyed all the meaning we have come to know and trust, we ask the unanswerable question, "Why?" "Why this, why me, why now?" We struggle to make sense of God's will. We attempt to comfort one another by drowning our ignorance in God's knowledge: "God knows best," we parrot to one another. Or "God has his reasons." Or "It is all part of God's divine plan."
So understood, God's will is a frightening and demeaning concept. Acts of God become themselves ungodly acts. We abase our dignity at the altar of an arbitrary, all-mighty and merciless magistrate. We place our trust in the hands of one who has destroyed our trust. We submit our hearts to one who has torn our hearts to pieces.
So why bother with God in the first place? Because God is the biggest imaginable metaphor for meaning. To cultivate both awe and humility—the two cornerstones of a mature spiritual life—we must not cap our search with some arbitrary ceiling. Besides, theology is not science, it is poetry. The ancient Hebrews recognized that "God" is not even God's name. God is our name for a power that is greater than all and yet present in each: the life force; the Holy; Being itself. Simply because others' theological imagination may be mean and crimped doesn't require us to suspend our own.
When our experience of reality renders traditional conceptions of God to be blasphemous—All knowing, All mighty, All cruel—we amateur theologians have two choices. Either we conclude that there is no God or we re-imagine the divine to re-encompass our experience of what is truly holy.
There is nothing novel, and certainly nothing blasphemous, about re-imagining or even renaming God. Responding to life-and-death questions, we have reinvented and thereby rediscovered the Holy throughout the centuries.
Consider our ancestors, the searchers who came before us. Begin with cave dwellers—hunters and gatherers—for whom the greatest imaginable powers were forces of nature. "God" is manifest in fire, therefore, in lightening and in thunder, perhaps even in the game they hunt for sustenance. When agriculture replaces hunting and gathering, these Gods turn into Goddesses. Power now lies in reaping and sowing, in the turning of the seasons. Fecundity determines survival, "God" becomes "Goddess;" procreation, creation; birth, life.
Later, with the city-state, power comes wrapped in the robes of authority. "God" is now Lord or King, protector, enforcer, and judge. A breakthrough in this view of the divine nature comes with the Hebrews, who believe that their God and King is the only God and King. Less an imperialistic than an ethical development, this leads them to attribute their failures not to another stronger God, but to their own shortcomings. With Jesus, God becomes Father (in fact, Daddy, or "Abba"), a far more intimate authority figure.
In Western society, the God most unbelievers reject is the traditional Judeo-Christian God: loving, just, demanding, capricious on occasion, sometimes cruel. Yet, aided by the Copernican revolution, for many thoughtful people this God was overthrown centuries ago. As has happened many times before, God was not therefore dead; "God" was re-imagined. When Copernicus displaced us from the center of the universe, in re-imagining God one group of scientists and theologians seized upon a metaphor better suited to their new worldview. Enter God the Watchmaker, who created the world, set it ticking, and then withdrew to another corner of the cosmos. This is the God of the Deists, a God icy and remote, still transcendent but no longer personal.
Today, we witness a further revolution, one as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Galileo half a millennium ago. From quantum physics to cosmology, scientific students of the creation have become masters of paradox. Post-modern philosophers contemplate the dynamic relationship between how we say something and what we mean. Political theorists speak of a global Empire whose emperor, though virtual not factual, is no less powerful and real. And theologians entertain notions of divinity no longer encumbered by static concepts such as omniscience and omnipotence. Having moved from one transcendent God to another (first Lord and Judge, then absentee landlord), we are beginning to encounter what might best be called a reflexive God, co-creator with us in an unfolding, intricate drama of hitherto unimaginable complexity. This God is not immutable, but ever changing, reaching and growing, even as we change, reach and grow. Such a God even grieves when we grieve, as we expand the compass of our empathy, ennobling our suffering into a sacrament. No longer merely actors on God's stage, by this reading of creation history, we are participants in the scripting of God's drama.
The surest path to God (the Sacred or the Holy) is to follow not the logic of our minds but the logic of our hearts. All of us suffer. We are broken and in need of healing. We struggle to accept ourselves and forgive others. Aware of our imperfections, we seek more perfect faith, hope, and justice. At our best, we see our tears in one another's eyes and rise together in answer to the urgings of conscience. We discover the Holy—its healing and saving power—by acting in harmony. Remember, God is simply our name for the highest power we know. If we define God as love—as good a definition as any I know—we discover God's nature in our personal experience of love. This may not mean God is actually love, but it certainly suggests that love is divine.
Let me tell you a story. One day a group of seekers begins to climb a mountain. Having been told that God lives at the top of it, they jettison their daily cares and leave them in the valley below. Climbing into the clouds on a quest for perfect wisdom, they follow the official signs that point to God: transcendent, all knowing, all‑powerful.
Finally, they reach the mountaintop. From the mountain's crest, they can see farther than they have ever seen before. And the air is thin at the top of the mountain. This promotes abstract and disembodied reflection on the eternal verities, which are confounded and veiled by the grossness, busyness and squalor of life below. There is only one problem. God is not there. It seems that while they were climbing up the mountain in search of God, God was climbing down the mountain into the valley. As earth-bound pilgrims dream to escape their human lot, desiring transfiguration into something immortal and divine, God's hope is to embrace humanity, become incarnate in mortal flesh, share our grief and pain, thus to escape the everlasting emptiness of eternity.
By this reading, when asked by an aid worker, "How can a loving God allow this to happen," the Bishop might reply, "Ah, my son, God is present not in the destruction we see around us, but in the work of your hands and the compassion of your heart. God is in your tears. God's heart breaks when your heart breaks. Despite all that has happened, my son, I have not lost my faith, in part because of you."
We are born into a great mystery. We die into a great mystery. In between—in that little dash between the dates on our tombstone—what we know of God we learn from love's lessons. Love teaches us the difference between what is holy and what is diabolical. When forty-five per cent of our countrymen and women contribute to disaster relief to help people suffering half way round the world, that is holy. When some true-believer blames the Tsunami on an American Atomic bomb test under the Pacific waters or refuses to accept aid proffered by Israel, that is diabolical. Through inner peace and outer harmony, the Holy unites us. When we act in concert with our higher selves and embrace our neighbors, we act in the presence of all that is divine. Conversely, the demonic divides us against our higher selves and from our neighbor. Whatever is born of hatred and division is not of God, but only that which truly saves, that which is born of love and compassion. So understood, God is not all-knowing or all-powerful, but all-loving and all-merciful. When love dwells in our hearts, God dwells in our presence. God's saving power manifests itself and grows through our own healing work.
Does this answer the question "Why?" No, it doesn't. Final answers to ultimate questions lie far beyond the ken of human understanding. We keep asking, of course. It's the nature of our being, the nature of our search. We keep climbing up to reach the stars even as God comes down to share our tears, each to the other like a vanishing pot of gold at two ends of a rainbow. The mystery is, by reaching for God—for a divine hand that turns out not to be there—we may in fact be changed, even saved. And in seeking us out, who knows? Perhaps God too is changed. Humbled. Spun into webs of passion and stung with pain. Fully brought to life.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.