| I guess God must really hate those who live by the coast….
But first, this.
I received Bob Dylan’s Chronicles for Christmas. Lying somewhere between autobiography and fiction – like the best of his songs – it’s easily the best rock ’n’ roll memoir since Ray Davies’s X-Ray, published more than a decade ago. I finished the book on January 8, sitting in the kitchen, just as the CBC began to play its coverage of the government’s hastily arranged "day of mourning" in token sympathy with victims of the Boxing Day tsunami crisis in South Asia.
So there I was. On the radio, there was an odd fusion of religious faiths – Islam, Buddhism and Christianity – trying to bring comfort and perhaps sense to those who’d lost loved ones in this recent natural disaster. And then there was me, rushing to finish Dylan’s brilliantly piercing yet evasive recollections. It was a moment of pure synchronicity. "It was a strange world that would unfold," Dylan wrote, in closing his account, of the day he signed his first recording contract more than four decades ago. "One thing was for sure, not only was it not run by God, but it wasn’t run by the devil either."
These words struck me. They came – to me at least – at the end of a week when many observers in Canada had seemingly recovered from their initial horror at the scale of carnage in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and elsewhere, and turned instead to theological ponderings. The day of the memorial, for instance, the Globe and Mail ran an essay by the Right Reverend Peter Short of the United Church of Canada, in which he asked the big question, "Where was God when the waters rose?" A day later, CBC radio’s religious program, Tapestry, asked much the same question.
In both cases, answers were less than satisfactory. "We do not know the why of it," Short admitted. "No one is responsible. There is nowhere to lodge the meaning or lay the blame, except at the doorstep of God. Who else can shake the foundations of the world?" Having raised the question of responsibility, however, the minister’s answer was far from reassuring. "I have come to believe that God’s ultimate commitment to the world … is not a commitment to control, but a commitment to love. I believe that between control and love God must have had to make a choice." On Tapestry, Rodger Kamenetz offered no greater insight into the Creator’s decision to ordain – or at least permit – the destruction of more than 150,000 lives.
There we have it. Men of devout Christian faith, apparently admitting that their God was either unable to save the lives of those He loved or chose not to do so. So much for omnipotence, then.
I’m sorry – maybe – but events in South Asia had nothing to do with the mysterious workings of any all-seeing, all-knowing Creator. Simple, if coldly brutal, geology and physics did the work. The scale of death should not detract us from this basic fact. In the same way, let us by all means display our true sense of humanitarianism in our response to the tsunami victims, reaching out to those we don’t and never will know, perhaps throwing in a measure of guilt as cause for our altruism and generosity. But let’s not invoke the supposedly mysterious ways and motives of God as a crutch to help us comprehend how such a disaster could happen.
I say this for at least two reasons.
First, there is something distinctly obscene in asking how God could allow so many to suffer, as if the sheer scale of fatality somehow translates into the intensity of suffering felt. What if "only" 15,000 had perished in the aftermath of Boxing Day’s flood, or "just" 1,500, or "merely" 150? Or what if only a single person had died? Would we then ask where God was at the time, or question His purpose? Do we only haul our deity into the dock of accountability once a certain threshold of carnage has been reached? If so, then clearly the loss of a single individual life, no matter how horrific the circumstances, is to remain explicable in purely human, secular terms. Tell that to the mother who loses her only child…..
Second, and with all due respect to UN secretary general Kofi Anan, the disaster in South Asia is not without precedent. Even excluding the various wars in the past century that claimed millions upon millions of lives, and even omitting Hitler’s success in eradicating more than six million Jews – perhaps 40 times as many as died in the recent crisis – there have been plenty of similarly scaled disasters in recent history, such as the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, the 1923 ’quake in Tokyo, Stalin’s purge of Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s, and the 1980s’ famine in Ethiopia. Where was God then?
Christian religion holds, as one of its fundamental tenets, that "man" was created in God’s image. We have, more than aardvarks, badgers or capybaras, a "special" relationship with the Almighty. Yet if that is the case, we might rightfully wonder whether God is prone to sporadic snits, like some omnipotent teenager. Or if His recurring "trials" or signs of displeasure are intended to elicit some sort of response from us, much as the biblical flood tested Noah’s faith, then we have been resolutely bad at getting the message. Either way, how much more of this can we take?
Or as Bob Dylan once sang, "At times I think there are no words / but these to tell what’s true / and there are no truths / outside the gates of Eden." |
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