Keeping the faith in the face of a disaster

Where is God when a tsunami strikes? The question has been addressed in recent times articulately and passionately by Patsy McGarry in this newspaper, and by Archbishop Seán Brady from a very different perspective.

It is an important question, which demands a response. However, it has always seemed to me that the best thing which religious believers can do at a time of tragedy is not to seek to explain, but to let their actions speak, by doing whatever needs to be done for others. Indeed, religious leaders in this and every other country have been to the forefront of the response to this disaster.

Mosques and churches were among the first places to which people ran when the disaster struck in Banda Aceh. Now they are serving as clinics and community centres for a shattered region.

In the wake of December 26th, mosques and temples have become mortuaries, facilitating the gruesome task of identifying bodies. Believers have also led prayers, and floated candles on the waves, in a way that has enabled people to express their grief through communal ritual. That, too, is a form of succour.

None of this is an attempt to justify disaster by pointing to the good that comes from evil. Paradoxical as it may be, people have needs other than the immediate and practical at a time of crisis, and turn to their religious representatives to meet them.

In no way are people of faith somehow immune to doubts or questions that plague any sensitive human being. Nor are they too busy hugging their security blanket of faith to really experience the darkness of human existence.

In fact, it seems as if saints in the Christian tradition, far from being immune, appear to experience an inordinate amount of doubt and darkness. Neither is it true that the only reasonable or human response to tragedy is to decide that either God does not exist, or if he or she does, that he or she is a monster.

However, faith that endures even in the face of tragedy can only be expressed haltingly, with humility, and always imperfectly. There are no simplistic answers, unless you are Jerry Falwell, who initially claimed that the events of September 11th were divine retribution for the actions of gays, feminists, and liberals. There are no answers to the question of suffering, in the sense of answers that negate or take away the questions. There are only responses, which honour the validity of the question.

Not that nuanced or thoughtful responses are immune from pitfalls. Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph. The headline in the first edition read, "Archbishop of Canterbury admits: This makes me doubt the existence of God". In fact, the Archbishop had said no such thing. Instead, he tried to convey that Christian faith is not about "comfort and ready answers."

When Lambeth Palace complained about the headline, a Daily Telegraph editorial writer got quite huffy on behalf of its sister paper. He chided, "If Dr Williams hopes to teach and inspire his flock, he really must learn to express himself more clearly. Otherwise, he will be forever doomed to be the victim of his own erudition." In other words, it is not possible that the headline writer got it wrong, only that the Archbishop is impossibly obscure.

What, though, if there is some value in not resorting to cut-and-paste answers? Rowan Williams makes that very point. "If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God? Wouldn't we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties?" He writes of hearing the Anglican Archbishop of Wales speak, after the 1966 Aberfan disaster, where 144 people died, of whom 116 were children, when a mountain of coal waste slid down into a Welsh village.

The Archbishop of Wales said that only the fact that he had experienced the loss of his own child gave him the courage to speak at all. "I have nothing to say that will make sense of this horror today. All I know is that the words in my Bible about God's promise to be alongside us have never lost their meaning for me. And now we have to work in God's name for the future."

These words are deeply unsatisfactory to people who see them as some kind of "Get out of jail free" card, utilised by religious people to evade the deeper questions. However, for Christians, God is not someone who wills the savage death of his own son, but someone who loves the world so much that he is willing to endure suffering and death alongside of humanity.

God is not so much a set of easy answers as a presence that sustains, even in the face of unanswerable questions.

It does not take a tsunami to alert us to the arbitrary nature of human life and death. The Archbishop of Canterbury points out that "there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous. How dangerous do they have to be? How many deaths would be acceptable?" The only alternative to a universe where bad things happen, is a universe where every event is controlled. That is a universe in which humanity, distinguished by its ability to make choices, both good and bad, would not exist.

Yet all of this dies away to silence in the face of fathers and mothers who could not hold the hands of small children, and had to watch them be swept away. The extraordinary thing is not that people cease to believe in the face of disaster, but that so many continue to believe. Perhaps my instincts were better at the beginning of this article.

The primary role of a believer at a time of disaster is to be of service to others. Part of that service must be to work in collaboration with people who cannot believe, so that we can build a world where the poor are not victimised many times over, first by so-called natural disasters, and secondly, by the lack of infrastructure and resources to deal with them.