An Act Of God?
Given by James Covington on January 9th, 2005
We have watched for days in stunned disbelief as television footage from South Asia continuously shows us mountains of bodies, some 30 percent of them children, and massive destruction of property. We can only imagine the psychological impact of the tsunami event on those impoverished nations of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India. To put this trauma into perspective, recall the numbing pain inflicted on the psyche of America on 9/11 when this nation of almost 300,000,000 people lost about 3,000 lives in a terrorist attack. The healing of these wounds is still unfinished. Yet a single town in Indonesia or Sri Lanka lost ten times that many in this tsunami. One event was caused by human beings, the other by nature.
This event, like all natural disasters, forces upon the people of the world a new and scary consciousness, a consciousness that will perhaps frame new, ultimate and very human questions for all of us.
In the meantime, I believe our nation must respond as though everything is at stake. Whether the governments of nations are democratic or western or Islamic, the ultimate response to the cataclysm in Asia will be a measure not of our patriotism, or ideological allegiance, but of our humanity. If, consequently, we Americans regain some of the global good will we have squandered over the past few years, then so much the better.
When it comes to defending human life against natural disaster, nothing need hold us back. There are no moral equivocations here. Theologians distinguish between two types of evil: moral and natural. Moral evil is caused by willful human actions, such as murder, rape, genocide, and the terrorist attack on 9/11. Moral evil encompasses the kind of human actions that in theory need never happen at all. One can imagine, for example, a world in which no woman was ever raped or genocide never sanctioned.
In contrast, natural evil is, well, natural. It is caused by what insurance documents call acts of god, such as earthquakes, floods and droughts. These are not consequences of human action, at least not directly, but rather are intrinsic to the cycle of life on this planet, in this universe. Sometimes the earth quakes and tsunamis wreck havoc, or chromosomes get confused and cancers grow. As a result human beings suffer and die. That’s just the way life is. An earthquake on the day after Christmas is a grim reminder of the tenuous place we occupy in the order of things.
The natural world does not endorse our decided preference for human life over other forces of nature, be it an earthquake or a cancer. Any time we confront a sudden and massive limitation on human life, we inevitably take stock of where we stand and where we are going. The turning of the New Year invites us to do the same. Both give us a sense of living at the hinge of history, the point of fulcrum between the past and the future. In truth, this moment is no different from any other. We stand where we always stand: between a past we cannot change and future we cannot predict. Nonetheless, this is a time to assess where we are and where we want to go. Who or what determines how, if at all, the future will be different? To put the question more precisely, who or what controls the future? God? Is the tsunami an act of God? Or nature’s indifference? Who is in control?
There are three primary answers to this question: 1)someone or something else sets the course of our lives(traditionally, we call it God); 2) no one is in control(there is no course, as such), or 3)we control our future, at least in part.
The assertion that life unfolds according to a plan devised by God has many adherents, particularly in the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. There is a planetary, historical context for this particular belief. From the historical perspective, this planet, our scientists tell us, is some four and a half billion years old. In its life span it has often not been a safe place for any living thing. During its first billion or so years, no life existed on this planet. Instead a constant barrage of meteorites and other particles of an exploding universe relentlessly pounded the earth’s surface.
No sense of tragedy was associated with the force of nature until some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago when our earliest, self-conscious ancestors finally emerged through the evolutionary process. Only then were there living beings whose minds enabled them to embrace time as a connected flowing whole. They could remember the past and anticipate the future, which meant that the uniquely human dimension of chronic anxiety entered the life of this world. Expanded knowledge enables us to know that yesterday’s violence might well return again tomorrow on the island of Manhattan.
The natural forces of storm, hurricane and earthquake were so intense that these creatures trembled in fear before their power and sought to placate whoever or whatever was in control of these forces that appeared to victimize them. Human survival required that we become aware of nature’s power without being immobilized by it.
Finding a way to deal with this trauma was the catalyst that caused primitive religion to be born. Our vulnerable ancestors survived by envisioning a powerful supernatural being, who was big enough to control the forces of nature and who was our ally. That was when human beings assumed that those devastating forces of nature were either expressions of this God’s power or events that occurred at the divine bidding. So, a contract with God, sometimes called a covenant, was formed. Human beings were compelled by their need for security to discern and obey the divine will and to please this supernatural being with respectful liturgies. That is why every human religious system has developed codes of conduct that are said to have been dictated by God. That is also why every human religious system has produced traditions of worship that must be adhered to in the minutest detail. Natural disasters were inevitably understood as to be expressions of divine wrath. Primitive religious leaders devoted their efforts to determining exactly what human beings had done to provoke the divine anger.
A consensus would be formed around some conclusions and a reformation would be instituted designed to express both penitence and new resolve to please God in the future. Fortunately, for these human interpreters, natural disasters were widely scattered in time so that the illusion could be preserved, that the adopted changes were successful and God was pleased to be their protector once again.
Generally, the modern world no longer holds this view. No one in the media has suggested the tsunami to be an act of God. However, some religious traditions still reflect this mindset. Jerry Falwell proclaimed that 9/11 was an act of God against secular liberalism. And in Indonesia, in the city of Banda Aceh, Islamic clerics have already said that the giant wave that devastated this overwhelmingly Muslim region is a warning to the faithful that they must more strictly observe their religion, including a ban on Muslims killing Muslims. One cleric said, “God is angry with Aceh people, because most of them do not do what is written in the Koran.”
The second answer to the question of who sets the course of our lives is that no one does. There is no plan, there is no course. According to this view, the present is the unlikely outcome of sheer happenstance. I admit that one can find ample evidence of life’s caprice and chaos, especially in the wake of devastating earthquakes. There are too many lifeless bodies, broken lives and shattered dreams in this world for a thinking person not occasionally to be struck by the absurdity of it all. In one of the most famous laments ever written, Shakespeare’s Macbeth declares that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Sometimes, when difficult and painful experiences confront us, we feel that way too. The natural world is indeed profoundly indifferent to human life. And sometimes people choose to act in ways that cause similar devastation by other means. In either case, whether we feel the brunt of nature’s indifference or the harshness of human wickedness, we cry out in rage. To a person who is suffering, life sometimes feels absurd—a word that means “contrary to reason,” or “meaningless.”
But when applied to life as a whole, the absurdity explanation does not satisfy. We know precisely why bad things happen. Some happen because people choose to do them; others, because they are part of the nature of things. What absurdity cannot account for is the persistence of so much of its opposite: order, beauty, happiness, love and goodness. Beauty depends on well-ordered physical relationships, goodness requires well-ordered ethical relationships, happiness derives from well-ordered emotional relationships—none of which are possible if life is contrary to reason and devoid of explanation.
This leaves us with the third answer: life follows an overall pattern, which we can in some measure influence. Our experiences as human beings are, at least in part, a consequence of decisions we make and actions we take. Some things in our lives are wholly determined and completely out of our control—earthquakes being a prime example. WE cannot change what has happened in the past, nor can we change some aspects of how our past will determine our future. For example, because I cannot change the fact that I was born in 1942, I cannot change the fact that I will turn 63 in the year 2005. But there are many aspects of my life over which I have substantial control. What my life is like this time next year, will be consequence, at least in part, of decisions I make between now and then in relation to my work, my loved ones and my world.
In other words, the way we live with one another and thrive as living, loving, interdependent creatures, is largely in our own hands. Unfortunately, this reality often doesn’t hit us until a natural catastrophe or some painful loss or event has occurred. Our more immediate self-interests, whether personal or national, often separate us from one another. It is only when humbled by events larger than life itself, that we realize how vulnerable and united we all ultimately are. Much of the world has become united in recent days, just as it was when 9/11 occurred. Why is it so difficult for humans to sustain the humility and compassion we need if we are to care for each other and live peacefully united?
We have hopefully learned in recent days, that all we can finally depend on in this world is our own fragile humanity and that human life is inextricably bound together in a common destiny. The theological challenge that rises inevitably in this crisis is the awareness that we alone are our neighbor’s keeper.
In the summer of 1993, throughout the Midwest, the common enemy was once again a flood. “God is making this flood for a reason,” one witness said as she watched dozens of people from as far away as Ohio and New Hampshire trying to keep the Mississippi River out of her backyard just north of St. Louis. “It’s to make us all come together.” However questionable her theology, it is true that whenever natural disaster strikes, people overcome their differences to better struggle against a common foe.
This model can be expanded. All around the world, especially in Africa, on any given day the real enemies are poverty and disease, crime and drugs, bigotry and corruption. Each beleaguers every group, regardless of faith, class, or color. Each hurts everyone outside a small criminal or corrupt element that feeds on our body politic like a cancer. If we were to unite to fight these common maladies of humanity instead of ideological ones, all, both individuals and the commonweal, would benefit.
The same is true of internecine hatred as we presently witness between Palestinians and Israelis, and perhaps now, America and Islamic nations. The question remains, how can we transcend the many temptations to demonize one another, to scapegoat, to attack other members of the one body rather than joining forces against a common enemy? We will only be united when we recognize our own experience of the universal human sacraments—pain and suffering, grief and death—in the lives of others, even our chosen enemies. Death has no respect for persons, races, religions, or ethnic groups. We now know this more than ever perhaps. How do we keep this truth seared in our consciences? Nothing unites us more profoundly than our common suffering and pain. Our mutual destiny, the dust in which all mingle, is the ultimate proof of our kinship.
If there be a God, who, in fact, acts at all in history, I believe that God will only be witnessed through acts of compassion and humility by human beings who act not only as a forceful global community in times of natural calamities, but also as a human community dedicated to the demise of poverty, oppression, tyranny and disease that afflict any nation. Is that expecting too much? If we don’t do it, who will?
A few years ago, in a small town in Israel, a struggling nonsectarian language school suspended classes for three days when a nearby Arab village was flooded by heavy winter rains. The faculty and all the students—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—responded to their neighbors’ emergency, working in shifts around the clock to bail the village out. As uncomprehending Israeli minister of education asked the school’s director, “What do you think you’re doing, when you have your own trouble all around you?’
To which she replied, “What do you mean ‘all around?’ The world is our village.”
A few years ago, we used to sing (we changed the words a little from the original): We’ve got the whole world, in our hands, we’ve got the whole wide world in our hands; we’ve got the whole world in our hands, we’ve got the whole world in our hands.
Well, that’s true to a point, of course. Ultimately, we are not in control. We can’t stop an earthquake, although we can devise better warning systems. But how we respond to death and destruction, poverty and tyranny is up to us. The record of the future will show how we responded. Either we helped the tsunami victims in Asia and the Aids victims in Africa, or we did not. Either we advanced the cause of justice and compassion in the world, or we did not. Either we acted to preserve the beauty and majesty of the planet Earth, or we did not. Either we worked to sustain and nurture our relationships, or we did not.
My New Year prayer is that the record of the future will show that we did.