On the Earthquake in Haiti
by: Valerie Elverton-Dixon on January 15th, 2010 | 4 Comments »
At this moment, I am angry with God. Do you not see this God? Did you cause this?
As I view the destruction, death, and devastation of the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, I am angry with God. God, the Being that is the power, the sense, and the presence of Radical Love allowed this. Theodicy fails us. There is no explanation or excuse for an all powerful Being who could not or would not prevent this. Is there some geological explanation that tells us that for some reason the earth’s tectonic plates needed to shift? Was this adjustment built into the structure of earth’s basic design?
Could it be some cosmic butterfly effect, where some creature in a different galaxy blinked and the vibrations reverberated through time and space and made the earth quake in Haiti? Perhaps God is the Most High of African cosmology who has done his work and retired to the highest heaven. He does not bother with human beings. He leaves this work to intermediary gods, some of whom have lived human lives, to intercede in human affairs. Love incarnate.
And so we look at this and see the confusion and chaos and tears and helplessness and hopelessness and the struggle for personal survival by any means necessary in one of the poorest countries in the world. The poorest of the poor are absorbing this shock. The history and poverty of Haiti is its own tragic tale of human malevolence –slavery, exploitation, domination and corruption. At the same time, the Haitian spiritual imagination helps us to see, name and explain the divinity of various human characteristics. There is the art and music and dance and food of a people who know that to climb one mountain is not enough. There is always another mountain to climb.
Now there is this. This is more than a mountain. This will require more than an individual determination that refuses to quit. This will require the world. The good news is that the world is responding. Nations from across the globe are offering aid. The military has become a rescue organization and a force for stability. Ordinary people are donating money. Five dollars here. Ten dollars there. We know at the heart of our humanity that we have an obligation to do what we can to help. The clatter of our political chatter, the cacophony of our hyper-partisan ideologically distorted public discourse is muted into a mere inconsequential whisper. The earth performed a minor undulation and reminded us once again of our mighty insignificance.
We are important only to the extent of our compassion. The world-wide response to this disaster gives me hope for humankind. The ways and purposes of Almighty God are too grand to understand. However, God gives us a portion of God’s love that becomes our strength, hope, faith and possibility.
Valerie, does it help with this cry of pain and anger at God to maybe think of God as not, after all, omnipotent? Our beliefs are different, so I am only raising this very tentatively. There’s a fine article in Tikkun by Rabbi Artson, “God is Becoming: Consolation in the Face of Tragedy” which I hope some people may read, that takes this route: http://www.tikkun.org/article.php?story=may_june_09_artson.
The other thing that comes to my mind every time some terrible earthquake or tsunami or similar thing happens is that cosmologists tell us that all the heavier elements in the earth and in our bodies were made in exploding stars: we owe our existence to unimaginably violent cosmic events as well as to unbelievably subtle, sensitive and complex biological events. Our own sun, and our earth’s molten core and plate tectonics are of a piece with this life and death of stars that made us, and with the symbiosis and interdependence of living things. I completely agree that we gain meaning for ourselves in so far as we choose to build on this interdependence with love, hope and faith.
Dave,
I want God to be all the ALLS.. All powerful, all knowing, all present. I agree with Rabbi Artson that we can think of God as becoming, However, I also want to think of God as Being. This makes God Being and Becoming as are we. I do not fret about why bad things happen to good people. The Christian scriptures explain this by saying: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation, who consoles us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to console those who are in any affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God.” (II Corinthians 1:3-4) When we go through difficult times, we know, on our own skin, what it feels like. When God brings us through, we now can help others who are going through and will go through the same thing.
The limit that I recognize to God’s power is the power God gives to human free will. God will not transgress our power of choice. Again I agree with Rabbi Artson that the love of God works through persuasion. When God maintains all of the Alls in our theological and philosophical imaginations this does lead to mystery. It is inexplicable. I do not agree with Rabbi Artson that this necessarily leads to the choice between blaming the victim or denying our ethical compass. Acts do have consequences, but not all that befalls us is a consequence of our particular acts. A womanist theodicy therefore is one where we do not seek to explain why God allows evil, but understands that God is the strength than helps us to survive it. This is the God our ancestors found in the holds of slave ships.
Within the mystery that is God, it is important to understand that we are simply one of many species in nature, one of many phenomena in a phenomenal cosmos that as you rightly point out is violent and explosive in its creative and destructive power. One Christian moral theologian, James Gustafson, makes this point in his work regarding a theocentric ethics. Humanity is not at the center of everything that happens. I am usually critical of Gustafson’s approach because humanity decides upon the meaning of things for itself. However, in our contemplations of the why of things it is important to know that not all of creation exists for our benefit.
So this leaves us to think about what God would have us do once the natural disaster has happened. I think God wants us to do what we are doing, to come together to bring aid and comfort to those who have been affected. God would have us think about why the buildings in Haiti could not withstand this shock and work to make better earthquake resistant structures there. More important, it illustrates once again to my mind why war is such a waste. Humanity is subject to natural disasters, why waste a moment, a dollar, a drop of blood fighting each other. We ought to use all our energy helping our fellow human beings live well.
Finally, I reserve the right to be angry with God. We are friends. God knows that I will shake my fist and ask what in the name of all that is holy God is doing. God also knows that through it all, I am still madly in love with the mystery that is God.
Peace,
Valerie
Valerie, thank you so much for this response. I find it hard to know what to say. I could talk a little about the fact that you do seem to accept another limit on God’s power — not just humans’ free will, but the “laws of nature” that determine that natural disasters happen, (so as far as I can tell in your theology God isn’t going to stop them to reward people or use them to punish people as some believers think). But in the context this feels like a dry argument, an “intellectual” point in the sense that we use “intellectual” to mean divorced from real feeling. The feeling of your response is very heart warming to me. I quite often find this, as a spiritual progressive who is theologically agnostic, in relating to my spiritual progressive friends who are believers. I often find their varied theologies, which I don’t agree with, facilitate or make possible for them a range of responses to the world that I resonate with or would like more access to myself: responses marked by deep emotional commitment and struggle, love, joy, compassion for suffering, inspiration, and spiritual nourishment. I go to theistic religious services and spend half the time deeply moved, and the other half wondering how to invoke and express the same communal responses in the nontheistic services I agree with but am often not so moved by.
Dave,
In my thinking regarding Gods’ omnipotence, our free will is not a limit on God’s power because it is a gift from God. The natural world is God’s creation that functions according to its own laws. However, God is the sense beyond sense, the meaning beyond meaning in these laws. God is the entity we cannot know completely. As the Apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians 13: ” we know in part.” The only thing that is not partial is love itself. And anyone who has loved, knows that it is an utter mystery,
Since, I am a theist, I do not know how to think about how to invoke the emotions that come from a relationship with the divine except to say that this relationship only has meaning as it inspires us to enter into right relationship with each other, with all of nature and creation itself. The love that we give and that we receive makes God real. Faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.
Peace,
Valerie