This will be my chant. Where were you when I needed you? Someone named Beth wrote a Psalm and that was the most poignant question in it.
What can you possibly say in the face of 200,000 dead in Southeast Asia and in parts of Africa because of an ocean’s wave? The questions are overwhelming, too great to imagine and too great to ignore.
My spiritual director asked me on Friday: Now you’re not going to say anything like this proves the End is near or this proves that God is mad at us humans. (I think she says stuff like that to get my blood pressure up).
No, I will leave such musings to others. I remember the shock at hearing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell suggest that the September 11 events were attributable to America’s embrace and affirmation of feminism and gay rights. In India, directly after the Tsunami hit, some Hindus advanced the theory that God was speaking directly to the arrest of Sawarswati, a Hindu religious leader.
With all due respect, that kind of reasoning is not remotely possible given my theological understandings. That kind of God of vengeance is not remotely of interest to me, is not slightly worthy of worship, as far as I’m concerned. More interesting, perhaps, that some feel it necessary to claim power for themselves and their belief system, in the face of such overwhelming natural power.
But, if those aren’t the questions, others remain.
Is there anything left to say about God? Is there something we can say about humanity? With the reflections of Kathleen Lawless Cox and Lisa Killinger, and with the choral piece by Edwards Choir, we get glimpses into what is possible to say, to sing. It has been said of theology, (words about what ultimately matters), that first and for some time there must be silence, then words, if necessary, emerge.
I don’t know about you, but that certainly was my response to the Tsunami. Overwhelming silence.
Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post this week, reflecting on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, said that he cringes when he hears easy verbal characterizations of God, given what happened at Auschwitz, given what happened at Rwanda, given what is still at play in the Sudan.
At that time of Auschwitz, it is said, Elie Wiesel, was at a gallows, watching, silently, painfully, a young Jewish person being hanged. Someone asked, Where is your God now? God is there, Elie said, hanging on that gallows.
Annie Dillard asks: Does God cause natural calamity? What might be the relationship of the Absolute to a lost schoolgirl in a plaid skirt? Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?
I have been in places at times of unbelievable suffering, especially when I was a chaplain. The loss of a child, a blinding horrifying accident that takes the life of a young person ready to bloom. On more than one occasion, I’ve heard a well meaning friend of the family or a well intentioned aunt or uncle say, God needed your son more than you did. God needed an angel.
That is some painfully bad theology. It is almost instinctual, however. We attempt to comfort ourselves by placing our ignorance in some larger meaning, normally involving God. It is hard to know what to say in difficult times.
I imagine that there are individuals walking around Southeast Asia as we speak offering simple answers, or manipulative answers, drawing on the fears of the traumatized to offer up a God of wrath and vengeance. I imagine that there are those who wish to victimize further the victimized for their own selfish gain.
If only the whole world had heard the prayers of the ten year old Muslim boy at the Tsunami Compassion service at Augustine College this past week: I pray for the children, he said, who will look around and not see their mother, who will look around and not see their father, I pray that they may be comforted.
There are too many stories that will never be told because the children have vanished. There are too many hugs that will be foregone. That is about all you can say: I wish it were otherwise.
We become, at times such as this, theologians, Rev. Forrest Church says. Not the kind of theologizing I prefer—done in a study, preferably alone, save the stack of books from my favorite Latin American or German or Harvard theologian, a nice cup of hot chocolate nearby, a black lab at my feet, a computer screen with sundry notes, real rhapsody playing an early Counting Crows album: I ponder. Consider this question: Augustine destroyed Christianity, yes or no? Discuss. Sophie, the black lab, is silent. Nicholas, my nine month old, is satisfied with his blocks and learning to crawl. He is why I sing praises, amidst the greatest sorrow imaginable. Norah just sings. Meanwhile, I find myself amazed at how much agreement there is about my theological musings, in my party with only one amateur theologian. The time of tsunamis most assuredly does not encourage this kind of theologizing. Comfortable, abstract, disconnected from reality.
Rather, it encourages the kind of theology done by Job:
What? What? What? What? (Or as Marta, my wife, says, on a regular basis: What just happened?)
This particular Biblical witness is strangely silent about the source of suffering, the cause of suffering. When Job demands an answer, when he gets sick of his friends offering lame excuses and explanations, he goes to God. He tells God he has a lawyer, an advocate. He is going to going after God with all he’s got.
And, after some time, the (non)answer comes from God, impatient and slightly sarcastic, God replies: Who are you, Sophia, my partner wisdom, that you were with me at the start of creation. Leave me alone.
Well, we can sort of file that under you know non helpful responses. Worthy of deepest reflection, nonetheless.
Rather, such a time as this encourages the kind of theology that invites us into deepest lament and objection and resistance.
My classmate, David Hunter, like me a Unitarian Universalist at Wesley Seminary, wrote a prayer of lament entitled Kosovo Lament.
O Nameless, Holy One,
O God of our mothers and fathers,
O God of Abraham and Sarah, and Hagar,
Wake Up! Wake up and listen!
Listen to your people, your suffering people.
We live in Kosovo; we live in Serbia, in Iraq, in the Ivory Coast, Indonesia,
Rwanda, Lebanon, Ireland.
We are your children; we are your brothers and sisters.
The sounds of bombs drowns out our cries,
And the floods of chaos overwhelm our tears.
You slaughter our sons in battle.
You rape our mothers.
You place mines in our children’s path.
You take our babies and dash their heads against the rocks.
God, do you see your world?
God, do you understand?
Our sages tell us that you are suffering with us.
We are not comforted.
We want your action, not your compassion.
Let there be a Day of the Lord!
Let your justice roll down like waters.
Let your justice drown those who wage war against your people.
Wake up. We are not comforted.
My chant will be this: Where were you when I needed you?
This idea that God is to blame for our misgivings, our terror, our waves of destruction may or may not be helpful. It depends on one’s context. It assumes some images of God that I suggest are worth the scrap heap. God as all-powerful, God as all-seeing, God as all-knowing. Praying with our eyes open is a book on engendering feminist prayer. It is from this book that I learned of Beth’s Psalm: Where were you when I needed you? It is a book that wrestles with the images of God, rather than simply reject God. It follows in the tradition of those who say, God is our deepest metaphor for meaning, so let us image God to capture what it is we’ve experienced of the true and the holy.
Rev. Forrest Church, has outlined in some of his writings the images of God that have been advanced and imagined and discovered over time. Over the ages, God has been reinvented, reimagined, and rediscovered. God and Goddess images have revolved around nature, agriculture, the seasons. With the emergence of city-states, God gets wrapped up in images of Lord or King, protector, enforcer, judge. The deists, surrounded by scientific discoveries, advanced the God as Watchmaker, creating the world, but withdrawn. No longer personal, yet transcendent, icy and remote.
Now, we are on the cusp of a further revolution in God’s image. Here is how Forrest Church describes this revolution: 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 expand the compass of our empathy, ennobling our suffering into a sacrament. No longer merely actors on God’s stage, we are participants in the scripting of God’s drama.
This reasoning advanced by Forrest Church, at least for those of us who are
Unitarian Universalists, has been in circulation from at least the time of
Alfred North Whitehead goes back to his lectures at First Parish in Cambridge.
He advanced his idea of process theology, which labeled God the fellow sufferer
who understands. From Whitehead, this idea finds it greatest expression in the
works of James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, who find the mysterious love of God at
work in the world despite many millions gone in the Middle Passage, despite the
character in Morrison’s Beloved, for instance, whose smile never goes away
because she has taken the bit so often. The love that binds these characters
together, groaning for liberation, remembering their wholeness and goodness
despite the worst of circumstances, that love’s other name is salvation.
When Baby Suggs, holy, is most torn asunder the mysterious love of God lays hold of her and won’t let go. At the point we are finished and giving up is the location of this love. The location is the misery of despair, and the blatant injustice which makes us despair; for where else should it display its creative power, the power which raises up, and put things to rights? Where else can it manifest itself except in whatever says no to life?
We, Annie Dillard writes, are the earth’s organs and limbs; we are syllables God utters from God’s mouth.
So, having considered all too briefly God, what shall we say about those of us who find ourselves in the position of being alive on this planet at this time, surrounded by the reality of those many who have lived and died, and those who have yet to live. Surrounded by the reality that we are born and will die, the great mystery. What shall we say of ourselves? We, the living now, restless multitude, Teillard called us, of orderly and confused, the immensity of which terrifies us, this ocean of humanity. What shall we say of us?
Might we borrow a page from Iraneus of Lyon: The glory of God is manifest in the person fully alive.
The signs of a person fully alive include gratitude, humility, openness to mutuality, and more than anything a profound sense of awe. Awe enables us to see that though the current is strong, and stronger than we, and though grief occasions to visit us more than once in a lifetime, we are still utterly enveloped in grace, as Emerson said. I don’t know but my guess is that this is the reason that Psalm 137, which is where we drew the song By the Waters of Babylon this morning, a psalm of deep lamentation and grief, is followed by a psalm of deep praise.
The person fully alive. Might that be enough? To ask that we respond to the suffering in Southeast Asia, the suffering in Sudan, the suffering of your neighbor down the road whose wife is dying a slow painful death, the suffering of your own spirit as it fights addiction or compulsion or loneliness or a general lack of meaning, is it enough in the face of that suffering to say I shall resolve to come fully alive.
And in my resolution, further, to surrender to the fact that hey, you know what? This isn’t all about me. I taught a class a week and a half ago, quite unexpectedly, on the Tao. At every turn of the page, I was confronted: What are you striving for? What are you so busy about? What are you doing? Who are you? One thing that seems clear as a result of this Tsunami: it’s not all about me. I think this time might be one big invitation to give ourselves over to something bigger than the strivings, the ego, the ambitions, the accumulation. We might just be invited to stand in greater solidarity with our neighbors. We might just be invited to understand anew the calls for brotherhood and sisterhood common to so many religious traditions. We might give ourselves over to the ministry, waiting to be born in us, about love’s possibilities in a time such as this.
All of us know suffering. All of us know pain. The Tsunami is a metaphor for the loss we feel on so many different levels. We are, each of us, broken. We struggle to accept one another and ourselves. If God is love, and the glory of God is made known in our small acts of kindness and healing, then we know what it is that we are called to be about, to give ourselves over to a change of heart:
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. The Talmud.
A ten year old Muslim captured the only possible theological response the other night when he said, May they be comforted. Nonetheless there are many questions and many invitations that confront us. May we know something of the comfort that comes from being the limbs of the holy, being co-creators with love, for a time such as this.
Boundaries by Rev. Lynn Ungar
The universe does not
revolve around you.
The stars and planets spinning
through the ballroom of space
dance with one another
quite outside of your small life.
You cannot hold gravity
or seasons; even air and water
inevitably evade your grasp.
Why not, then, let go?
You could move through time
like a shark through water,
neither restless nor ceasing,
absorbed in and absorbing
the native element.
Why pretend you can do otherwise?
The world comes in at every pore,
mixes in your blood before
breath releases you into
the world again. Did you think
the fragile boundary of your skin
could build a wall?
Listen. Every molecule is humming
its particular pitch.
Of course you are a symphony.
Whose tune do you think
the planets are singing
as they dance?
January 30, 2005 - Unitarian Church, Davenport, Iowa. Rev. Roger Butts