Posted on 12/30/2004 12:07:56 PM PST by Lorianne
Turning to both Judaism and Buddhism for solace, the author meditates on God's role in the tsunami tragedy.
I am trying to connect to this tragedy the best I can. The pictures help a little. I see dead children on the floor, a parent weeping. The little ones look like they are sleeping; it is unimaginable that they are dead. I see a parent holding his dead child. I feel in my body what it is like to hold... that weight. To feel the life gone, and the heaviness of a body that does not have life. It is different from holding a sleeping child, carrying a child to bed for instance. I can feel what this father feels in the photo, can reach in my imagination, and in my memory.
But I can't multiply what I feel by 10,000 or 40,000, or even by ten. We know more than we can feel. And we respond as best we can, I think. This is our situation in a time of instant global communication. The heart does see from one end of the world to the other, and faster than the internet.
I read that when someone witnessed the huge tidal wave approaching the shore, he thought it was "biblical." The flood story came to his mind, I guess, and behind it the old primitive idea of an angry God, destroying what he once created. Some people still think this way: everything bad that happens is a curse or a punishment and has a reason, even if we don't know what the reason is. I don't buy it.
The children killed didn't have enough time in this life to deserve this death.
This kind of disaster opens difficult prospects for the Western imagination. Some would see in it a monstrous demiurge: an all-powerful God who kills innocent children. We hear the bitter words in King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport." Others, seeking to justify God to man, will offer the simple idea that whoever suffers somehow had it coming.
There is a deeper story about suffering in the Talmud. In this story, Moses travels to heaven and sees for himself that Rabbi Akiba is the greatest teacher of Torah. When Moses asks God what Akiba's reward will be, God shows him a vision: Akiba tortured by Romans in the marketplace, his flesh stripped from his body.
Just as it is incomprehensible to us that children, whole families, whole islands could be taken up by a wave and drowned, it is incomprehensible to Moses that a great and good teacher would be "rewarded" with torture.
When Moses asks why, God answers with a riddle, "It arose in thought."
To our own human notion of justice, "it arose in thought" seems cruel and unaccountable. Those who wrote this story must have felt that injustice keenly. But the starkness of this tale shows a kind of maturity of vision we sadly lack in today's religious discourse. God in the story offers no real explanation. There is none at the human level that we could understand. We stand before it stunned and uncomprehending.
At the level of our feelings of right and wrong, we understand there is no explanation for dead children on a beach who were playing and swimming one moment and taken away by a huge wave in the next. I can't accept the answer suggested by the Buddhist idea of group karma, that whatever happens to a group is somehow the result of a previous action of that group, either in this life or in a previous life. I don't accept that explanation in this case.
I don't believe it because this disaster happened to children. They didn't have enough time in this life to deserve this death. And in a previous life? No, that is too abstract for me. The explanation that their acts in a previous life may have warranted this death lacks specificity--and a number of deaths so huge already lacks too much specificity. I need to feel more, not less.
One time I asked the Dalai Lama how he would respond to a parent who had lost a child. And he said--these aren't his exact words--that when you lose a child you are constantly thinking of that child in your imagination. He called the child a "dear one." And he said, "You must know that your 'dear one' does not want you to suffer, to feel so much grief." I found this meditation wholly beautiful.
I don't believe in a God who punishes through disaster. The disaster is.
He added that for a Buddhist, suffering is in the nature of things, and so he would try to remind a Buddhist to reflect on that. But, he said, for a Westerner, there would arise the question of meaning. This boils down to the question of Job: Why would a just God allow the innocent to suffer? The question is just as profound for an individual loss as for a mass disaster: It doesn't get more profound, just more inescapable.
I don't believe that a mass disaster, in and of itself, tells us anything about God. I don't believe in a God who punishes through disaster. The disaster is. That is exactly the way I would understand it, without adding my own interpretation, without supplying a meaning or completing the sentence. The disaster is. The tragedy is. And I need to abide with it, and feel it, instead of seeking an answer, because the answers just make me complacent and take me away from the children on the beach, and the father with the dead child in his arms.
There is no God in the disaster.
I think there is God in the response, in the human hearts of those who are feeling and responding to this, the families and neighbors of the victims, and the rest of us, the bystanders, and us, too. The whole world is feeling it.
I used to think that if something unaccountably bad happened to someone, it needed to be compensated by something good. That was my own internal accounting, my own way of repairing my sense of order, of justice. A boy loses his sight, but he becomes a musical genius. A teacher of mine lost his mobility to polio, but he gained the ability to be a blessing to others. One time I said such things in a public talk, and a woman in a wheelchair rolled toward me and said with great seriousness and very slowly, "I would like you to consider that a disability means…absolutely nothing."
I heard her and felt how I had glibly covered over my heart with an easy reaction.
I love what the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of modern Hasidism, said when asked to define equanimity. "If whatever happens you can say, if it's good enough for God, who am I to judge? That's equanimity." And he added, "But that is a very high rung."
It is a very high rung and I cannot say I am standing on it now, and rarely ever. I cannot say that this tsunami is for the good.
It is not for the good, it is not for the bad. It just is.
It is not a blessing, it is not a curse, it just is.
A tectonic plate shifted, and a vast wave spread across the ocean, and took with it many lives.
And now another wave is spreading, and it is also vast, and it spreads through the hearts of those who let themselves feel it.
The disaster is. It happened to a "dear one," someone's "dear one," many dear ones. I open my heart and feel it. The place it touches in me, touches God.
Without sin, there would be no need for judgement.
Great point. The athetists are so willing to point to "God" as being an evil failure because of this natural disaster, but how many of them point to the perpetrators of the killing of unborn babies, performed by the will of men? Which is more horrific? Which is more "evil"?
Despite what some people on FR have said, I don't believe that God sent the earthquake and tsunami to wipe out these people. Things like this have happened for thousands of years and are part of the natural order God created. (Well, became part of the natural order once man ruined his perfect creation.)
Some of us struggle to put this in perspective for ourselves, to have some tiny glimmer of comprehension of the enormity of this situation for the world and the reality for the individuals. This guy is just a writer, and his article was gentle and reminded me of Peggy Noonan's article from this morning. This article seems like a personal thing, as opposed to those demanding public shows of emotion from people like President Bush. Symbolic gestures seem especially empty at a time like this.
This is just hard for some of us to wrap our brains around, and it's interesting (and sometimes helpful) to get different perspectives.
Nope, when Adam and Eve gave up their position for the fruit, they surrendered to futility. God warned them and they and us, to this day, don't listen very well.
God is fully justified in what he does. He was right to wipe out the earth during the flood of Noah and he will be right to burn up the earth 'with fervent heat' when he is done with it.
The question is not, why God allowed it, but why he restrains the earth and man from going to it's logical conclusion - total futility. The answer is God's Grace and Patience - for which there will be an end.
Turn to the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. Ask him to save you from the Tsunami of death to come.
Okay. Thanks for your thoughts ... it's interesting how differently people can react to the same piece!
It would have been more merciful to destroy Job-- since God believed he was the one guy good enough to not act the way Satan bet God any man would act. It's funny to believe against abortion for religious reasons, but believe in a God who would slaughter with precision a man's family for quite possibly the worst reason ever-- a bet with Satan. At least with Abraham and Isaac, God said he was just kidding at the last minute.
You probably could have made it through your day just fine without benefit of my thoughts, hey? But thanks for being kind. (I still hold my breath sometimes when I hit "Post" for the second time on this board. You just never know what you're gonna get.)
In the words of Eliezer Wiesel:
Never shall I forget that night,
the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one
long night, seven times cursed and seven
times sealed. Never shall I forget that
smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of
the children, whose bodies I saw turned into
wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which
consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence
which deprived me, for all eternity, of the
desire to live. Never shall I forget those
moments which murdered my
God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never
shall I forget these things, even if I am
condemned to live as long as God Himself.
Never.
GOD DIDN'T DO THIS!
The real answer is: "the devil comes to steal, kill and destroy ... I have come that you might have life, and that more abundantly". Jesus made the statement!
GOD is our heavenly Father .. if YOU being a father or mother would intentially do this to your family - you'd be hung by the neck until dead. How can anyone even think GOD would do this or would purposefully allow this is just beyond me.
GOD doesn't drown people; break their arms; break their legs; smash them in the head. To believe that is wrong thinking and wrong believing.
However .. we are living in the last days .. and just who would want to take all these UNSAVED people to hell with him .. the devil. He knows his time is short and he's willing to destroy as many people as possible to keep them from receiving eternal life.
These Asian people have rejected GOD and have chosen to serve another god - therefore GOD's not able to protect them from the schemes of the enemy.
And .. I'm just getting warmed up!!
BTTT
You joke, but your characterization is spot on. No parent would tolerate that behavior-- doing something canine in its horribleness because of a dare (one made by the most irredeemably horrible creature ever, no less!) It's wrong on so many levels. My child does that and I'll pull the lever on the day they go to the chair.
Check the Bible Code.....
sw
These natural disasters are of course always horrible and tragic, but in a strange way, maybe it's a good thing for all us everywhere on the planet to be reminded every once in a while that there are forces out there in Heaven and on Earth that are far greater and more powerful than we are.
Good grief... You don't actually give credance to the idea that the HAARP system in Alaska controls the weather for warfare, do you? If so, it has crappy aim. Florida hit four times. Whoops.
APf
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