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.
THANKYOU,
Their will allways be death because of the admamic fall.
The only way to life everlasting is through JESUS CHRIST.
True christianity teaches us this is only a way station on this side of glory.
my belief structure is that GOD is totally soveriegn in all things.
GODSPEED!
I'm slow today, I guess. I have no idea how your post is relevant to my post. Please explain.
Personally, i dunno and do not even have an inkling. Clueless i remain. But if day-to-day control over that facility has been transferred to a private corporation perhaps the FBI, NSA or whoever ought to determine what is going on up in Alaska. What if the corporation is controlled by a foreign company or a U.S. corporation held as a subsidiary of another foreign corporation. i dunno, really.
He did with Noah's flood.
God bless you.
If memory serves me correctly, Noah warned his neighbors. They laughed at him.
GOD didn't drown them - THEY REFUSED TO GET ON THE BOAT!! If I remember correctly they laughed and joked about Noah - and called him crazy.
Deut 28-29 - "I have set before you this day life and death - NOW YOU CHOOSE!! Then .. in GOD's mercy HE gave people a clue, and HE said, "but choose life". Evidently, the people in Noah's day made the wrong choice.
So .. how did you choose ..??
And you could feel the same way about me ... but if we just wanted to talk to ourselves, we could be washing dishes right now!
Thank you! Your post said it all.
This is a different tragedy entirely.
One is unforgivable, the other unimaginable.
"The fact that we even call such events "tragic" speaks of the value we give to life and people's well-being -- a value which is itself sparked by God, I believe. The fact that we feel sorrow at the loss of life -- whether that number be one, or 100,000 -- proves, to me, that God is there.
In the immortal words of Neil Diamond, "and the grass don't pay no mind"
That's correct, but your statement still fits either situation.
"Sometimes there are no answers. Only those left to grieve for a lifetime."
Here's some interesting info from this thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1310099/posts
Venkatanathan, said, 'we predicted that the disaster will occur on 26 December 2004 at 00:30 (GMT) with 3.54 N latitude and 97.17E longitude, which is located near the coast of Banyak Island, Sumatra, Indonesia, with a magnitude at around 6 to 7. The actual calamity occurred on 26 December 2004 at 00:58 (GMT), with 3.298 N latitude and 95.779 E longitude, located off the west coast of northern Sumatra'.
The difference in distance between the predicted place and the epicentre was 157.11899 km with a time difference of 28 minutes. He also said the team had predicted that the after-shocks would occur at 700 km to the South of the epicentre between 5 pm and 6 pm. This was recorded with permissible error. It occurred at 157 km from the epicentre. That is with the error of 521 km.
Venkatanathan and his guide N Rajeshwara Rao, research supervisor as he calls him, admit that 'we didn't expect the extent of damage it will cause to the Tamilnadu coast, since we expected the magnitude might be around 7.0, which cannot damage Tamilnadu. We never expected the consequent tidal waves that would have such a devasting effect on the coastal areas of Tamilnadu, admitted Rajeshwara Rao.
Venkatanathan explained that the prediction was based on a novel method developed by the team. According to the method, when two or more planets, Sun and the Moon get aligned more or less in line (0 to 180 degree) with the earth it could affect the angular momentum of the earth and decrease the speed of rotation of the earth which could trigger an earthquake.
But in order to trigger an earthquake in one particular place, two conditions should be taken into consideration, said Venkatanathan. One is the distance of the planetary configurations and two the directions of force acting at the possible epicenter.
Venkatanathan also clarified that by analysing the earthquakes that had occurred over the last 100 years, it was inferred that there was a role of planetary configurations in triggering earthquakes. He added that the team had earlier predicted possibility of earthquake occurrences at 27 places, among which Assam was one, and presented a report at the International Conference of 'Hazards 2004' held at National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad.
He said the success of the prediction rate achieved so far was around 75 to 80 per cent within a time-frame of plus or minus three to four days.
Codswallop! HAARP does not cause tectonic plates to shift.
Nope. Planetary alignments do not cause tectonic plate shifts.
The countries that were hit actively persecute Christians and Jews. Sri Lanka still rejected help from Isreal after this disaster. They've been warned and have rejected it.
Pure blarney.
I chose to accept God's salvation through Christ. The Muslim and Buddist countries that got hit didn't. When the Great Tribulation period comes with great earthquakes, storms, etc, will the naysayers still deny God's hand of judgment? Yes.
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