Dr. Daya Hewapathirane
Rev. Tom Honey was the Parish priest (vicar) of the Church of
England in Oxford for more than 20 years and was highly reputed for his
thoughtful sermons and the best perhaps being the one he gave in 2005, on Almighty
God and Tsunami Disaster” after the devastation caused by the Indian ocean
tsunami in which some 300,000 people died. https://www.ted.com/speakers/revtom honey.
What he said then on god and the tsunami
devastation, is directly applicable to the present CORONA VIRUS HEALTH DISASTER
as well. The corona virus pandemic has been spreading rapidly across the world,
affecting more than 520,000 people by late March 2020, in 175 countries, with a
death toll of more than 23,500. Numbers affected and death toll appear to show an
increasing trend, especially in European (Catholic and Christian countries),
notably Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, UK, Netherland, Switzerland, Belgium, Sweden, Turkey, Austria,
Denmark and among non-European countries, the most affected are in China, USA,
Iran, Brazil and South Korea
Rev. Tom Honey, the British Parish priest said in his sermon, How can the existence of evil be reconciled with an
almighty God who is also all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful? I have been a parish
priest in the Church of England for more than twenty years. For most of that
time I’ve been grappling with questions about the nature of God. I’m very aware
that when you say God, most people within and outside the church, still have a
picture of a celestial controller, a policeman in the sky who orders everything
and causes events to happen. He will protect his own people and answer the
prayers of the faithful. In the worship of our church the most frequent
adjective when we address God is ‘almighty’; but I have become more and more
uncomfortable with this common perception of God over the years. Do we really
believe in the male boss that our liturgies proclaim?”
He said Two weeks after
the tsunami, Sunday morning 9th January. I found myself standing in front of my
congregation, intelligent, well-meaning, thoughtful Christian people. I needed
to express, on their behalf our feelings and our questions. This is what I
said. Shortly after the tsunami I read a newspaper article, written by Rowan
Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, about the tragedy in Southern Asia. The
essence of his words was this: the people most affected by the devastation and
loss of life do not want intellectual theories, about how God can let this
happen. 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?”
If the man in the
photograph holding the hand of his dead child was standing in front of us now,
there are no words that we could say to him. The only appropriate response
would be compassionate silence and practical help. It isn’t really a time for
preaching or theology, but for tears. This is true, and yet we are here,
semi-detached from events so far away, with our faith bruised, and we want an
explanation from God.”
Some have concluded that
we can only believe in a God who shares our pain. In some way, God feels the
anguish and grief, and physical pain that we feel. In some way the eternal God
can enter into the souls of human beings and experience the torment within. And
if this is true, it must also be that God knows the joy and exaltation of the
human spirit. A God who weeps with those who weep and rejoices with those who
rejoice. This seems to me both a deeply moving and a convincing restatement of
Christian belief about God. For hundreds of years the prevailing orthodoxy, the
accepted truth was that God the Father, the creator, is unchanging and
therefore cannot feel pain or sadness. The unchanging God feels a bit cold and
indifferent to me. I wonder if you agree.”
The devastating events of
the 20th century forced people to question the cold unfeeling God. The
slaughter of millions in the trenches and in the death camps, caused people to
ask, ‘Where is God in all this?’ And the answer was, God is in this with us, or
God doesn’t deserve our allegiance. If God is a bystander, observing but not
involved, then God may exist, but we don’t want to know about him. Many Jews
and Christians now feel like this, I know. And I am among them. So, we have a
suffering God. A God who is intimately connected with this world, and with
every living soul. I very much relate to this idea of God. But it isn’t enough.
I need to ask some more questions, and I hope they are questions that some of
you want to ask as well, some of you.
Over the last few weeks I
have been struck by the number of times that words in our worship have felt a
bit inappropriate, a bit dodgy. On Tuesday mornings we have a Pram Service for
Mums and their pre-school children. Last week we sang with the children, one of
their favourite songs – The Wise Man Built His House on the Rock. Some of the
words go like this the foolish man built his house upon the sand…….and the
floods came up……and the house on the sand went crash”. Then at a funeral there
was the familiar hymn We plough the fields and scatter”. In the second verse
comes the line, the wind and waves obey him.” Do they? I don’t think we can
sing those words again. So, the first big question is about control. Is God in
control? Does God order each moment? Does God have a plan for each of us? Do
the wind and waves obey him?
From time to time one hears
Christians telling the story of how God organised things for them, so that
everything worked out alright. Some difficulty was overcome, some illness
cured, some trouble averted, a parking space found at a crucial time. I can
remember someone saying this to me, her eyes shining bright with joy, as a
wonderful confirmation of her faith and the goodness of God. But if God can or
will do these things, intervene to change the flow of events, then surely, he
could have stopped the tsunami happening. A local god who can do little things
like parking spaces, but not big things like 500mph waves. That’s not
acceptable, and we must acknowledge it. Either God is responsible for the
tsunami, or God is not in control. After the tragedy, survival stories began to
emerge. The man who surfed the wave. The teenage girl who recognised the danger
because she had just been learning about tsunamis at school. Then there was the
congregation who had left their usual church building on the shore to hold a
service in the hills. The preacher delivered an extra long sermon, so that they
were still out of harm’s way when the wave struck. Afterwards someone said God
had been looking after them. So, the next question is about partiality. Can we
earn God’s favour by worshipping him or believing in him? Does God demand
loyalty like any medieval tyrant? A god who looks after his own, so that
Christians are ok, while the others perish. A cosmic us and them, and a god who
is guilty of the worst kind of favouritism. That would be appalling, and I
would have to hand back my membership. Such a god would be morally inferior to
the highest ideals of humanity.
So, who is God, if not the
great puppet-master or the tribal protector of Christians? Perhaps God allows
or permits terrible things to happen, so that heroism and compassion can be
shown. Perhaps God is testing us, testing our charity or our faith. Perhaps
there is a great, cosmic plan that allows for horrible suffering so that
everything will work out in the end. Perhaps, but all these ideas are
variations of God controlling everything. The supreme commander toying with
expendable units, in a great campaign. We are still left with a God who can do
the tsunami and allow Auschwitz. Almighty God is just incompatible with loving
God.
In his great novel The
Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky gives these words to Ivan, addressed to his
naive, devout younger brother Aly osha, If the sufferings of children go to
make up the sum of sufferings which is necessary for the purchase of truth,
then I say beforehand that the entire truth is not worth such a price….we
cannot afford to pay so much for admission….it is not God that I do not accept.
I merely most respectfully return him the ticket.” Or perhaps God set the whole
universe going at the beginning and then relinquished control for ever, so that
natural processes could occur, and evolution run its course. This seems more
acceptable, but it still leaves God with the ultimate moral responsibility for
human behaviour and natural processes. Is God a cold unfeeling spectator?…or a
powerless lover, watching with infinite compassion things God is unable to
change?…..Or is God intimately involved in our suffering, so that God feels it
in his own being.
If we believe something
like this, we must let go of the puppet-master completely, take our leave of
the almighty controller. Abandon traditional models. We must think again about
God. Maybe God doesn’t do things at all. Maybe God isn’t an agent in the sense
that we are all agents. Early religious thought conceived God as a sort of
super human person, doing mighty acts all over the place. The God of the Old
Testament fought for his people, drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea, wasted
cities, and wiped out the enemy down to the last woman and child. The people
knew their God by his mighty acts.
But what if God doesn’t
act? What if God doesn’t do things at all? What if God is in things? The loving
soul of the universe. An indwelling, compassionate presence, underpinning and
sustaining all things. What if God is in things? In the infinitely complex
network of relationships and connections that make up life. In the natural
cycle of life and death, the creation and destruction that happen continuously.
In the process of evolution. In the incredible intricacy and magnificence of
the natural world in the collective unconscious, the soul of the human race. In
you and me, mind and body and spirit, in the tsunami, in the victims. In the
depth of things. In presence and in absence. In simplicity and complexity, in
change and development and growth.
How does this in-ness, this
interiority of God work? It’s hard to conceive and begs more questions. Is God
just another name for the universe, with no independent, external existence? I
don’t know. To what extent can we ascribe personality to God? I don’t know. In
the end, we have to say, I don’t know”. If we knew, God would not be God. To
have faith in this God would be more like trusting an essential goodness and
benevolence in the universe, and less like believing a system of doctrinal
statements. Isn’t it ironic that Christians who claim to believe in an
infinite, unknowable being, then tie God down in closed systems and rigid
doctrines? Faith in God demands the huge step of saying, despite all
appearances to the contrary, I trust that there is a loving presence, but I
will live without knowing.”
How would one practise such
a faith? By seeking the God within. By cultivating my own inwardness. In
silence, in meditation, in my inner space, in the me that remains when I gently
put aside my passing emotions and ideas and preoccupations. In awareness of the
inner conversation. How would I live such a faith? By seeking intimate
connection with your inwardness. The kind of relationships when deep speaks to
deep. If God is in all people, then there is a meeting place where my
relationship with you becomes a three-way encounter. There is an Indian
greeting ‘namaste’, accompanied by a respectful bow which roughly means, ‘that
which is of God in me greets that which is of God in you’. How would one deepen
such a faith? By seeking the inwardness which is in all things. In music and
poetry, in the natural world of beauty, in the small ordinary things of life,
there is a deep indwelling presence that makes them extraordinary. But it needs
a profound attentiveness, and a patient waiting. A contemplative attitude, an
awareness of my own infinite value, and a generosity and openness to those
whose experience is different from mine.
When I stood up to speak to
my people about God and the tsunami, I had no answers to offer them. No neat
packages of faith with Bible references to prove them. Only doubts and
questions and uncertainty. I had some suggestions to make – possible new ways
of thinking about God. Ways that might allow us to go on, down a new and
uncharted road. But in the end the only thing I could say for sure was I don’t
know, and that might just be the most profoundly religious statement of all.
DR ROWAN WILLIAMS – THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, writes in The Sunday Telegraph UK, on 02 January 2005 a deeply
personal and candid article, where he says “it would be wrong” if
faith were not “upset” by the catastrophe which has already claimed
more than 150,000 lives. The Asian tsunami disaster should make all Christians
question the existence of God,
Dr Rowan Williams admits that Prayer provides
no ‘magical solutions’ and most of the stock Christian answers to human
suffering do not “go very far in helping us, one week on, with the
intolerable grief and devastation in front of us”.
Dr Williams, who, as head of the Church of
England, represents 70 million Anglicans around the world, writes: “Every
single random, accidental death is something that should upset a faith bound up
in comfort and ready answers. Faced with the paralysing magnitude of a disaster
like this, we naturally feel more deeply outraged – and also more deeply
helpless.” He adds: “The question, ‘How can you believe in a God who
permits suffering on this scale?’ is therefore very much around at the moment,
and it would be surprising if it weren’t – indeed it would be wrong if it
weren’t.” Dr Williams concludes that, faced with such a terrible challenge
to their faith, Christians must focus on “passionate engagement with the
lives that are left”.
