Confronted with the world’s greatest natural disaster for half a century, religious leaders strove to make theological sense of the tsunami and console congregations that might ask why God allowed the tectonic plates under the Indian Ocean to shift so catastrophically on Boxing Day.
Christians stressed God’s presence with the suffering, Hindus reconciled themselves to fate, the Chief Rabbi composed a prayer and the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph.
Lambeth Palace complained last night that the archbishop’s words had not borne the headline that the newspaper chose to put on them: ”Archbishop of Canterbury: This has made me question God’s existence” – which would indeed have been an extraordinary admission from such a source. It insisted instead that Dr Rowan Williams had merely hypothesised that it would be wrong for Christians not to question what God was up to.
Dr Williams wrote: ”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?
”If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why 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… belief has survived such tests again and again, not because it comforts or explains but because believers… have learned to see the world and life in the world as a freely given gift. They have learned that there is some reality to which they can only relate in amazement.”
The same newspaper has questioned the depth of the archbishop’s faith before. Only four months ago it chided Dr Williams for admitting that the Beslan school siege raised questions about faith.
Lambeth Palace said yesterday: ”Whilst the archbishop’s article itself has been transcribed faithfully, the headline reporting it was a misrepresentation of [his] views. As any reading of the text makes instantly clear, the archbishop nowhere says that the tsunami causes him to question or doubt the existence of God: rather that the Christian faith does not invite simplistic answers to the problem of human suffering. It is extremely disappointing that what is a thoughtful response to the challenge posed by events of these kinds to the mind and heart of the believer has suffered in the search for a headline.”
But around the country yesterday, leaders from all major faiths were joining Dr Williams in attempting to explain how the tragedy could be reconciled with their religious beliefs.
Terrifying power
At Sandringham, the Queen and the royal family prayed for the victims of the disaster and heard the Right Rev Graham James, Bishop of Norwich, confess that a week before he would not have known what a tsunami was: ”We all now understand the terrifying power of a wall of water 30 feet or more high travelling at several hundred miles an hour. Words seem cheap when the cost of lives has been so expensive… God has given us an Earth that lives and moves. It is not inert, it is alive – that is why we can live. Last week’s events were the starkest possible reminder that what gives life also takes it away.”
Preaching at Albrighton, Shropshire, the Right Rev Alan Smith, Bishop of Shrewsbury, told his congregation that the wave was the stuff of nightmares and cited the Old Testament prophet Job, who lost his family in an earthquake.
”As scientists tell us, randomness is something that is built into the fabric of creation and is the mainspring of the Earth’s capacity to change itself and develop,” he said. ”This reality is something each generation has to come to terms with as we try to make sense of life… God does not prevent suffering but instead promises to redeem it. And it is this promise that we see fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
He continued: ”In response to the question ‘Where is God in all this?’ I have two things to say… that God is the crucified one, the one who is in the midst of the pain not separate from it, secondly, God is to be found in the hands of those who are helping to bury the dead, to bring clean water to the living, to administer medicine to the ill and counsel to those in darkness. This is the faith of the church.”
Catholic leaders took a more abstract view. In Birmingham, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, the city’s Catholic archbishop, said at mass: ”Our faith tutors us in moments such as these to a quite particular belief in God… God’s light is most like love and, as we have seen over and over again, disaster does not wipe out love: rather it intensifies it. Disasters do not wipe out faith any more than they wipe out love… the light of God glows more persistently in that awful darkness. It shines in human heroism, generosity, selflessness and courage.
”Death, of course, is the ultimate disaster, but come it will… But no matter how death comes, whether it is early, whether it comes in the full vigour of adulthood or slowly after a long decline; whether it comes in a sudden physical collapse or in a calamity… it has no power to rob us of our God-given grace, our destiny to be with God for all eternity.”
Christian leaders have had plenty of practice at considering their explanation for disasters, from the Black Death to the Holocaust. Few now however would share the sort of explanation reached by the Emperor Justinian, who concluded that the plague which wiped out a third of the inhabitants of Constantinople in 541 was the result of the city’s sinfulness: in that case the ”vile acts” of men with each other.
The destruction of the Portuguese capital Lisbon in an earthquake in 1755, which killed 60,000 people, was the event which helped to provoke the Enlightenment and first caused philosophers to ask more sophisticated questions about God’s role than divine vindictiveness towards wicked people.
Iqbal Sacranie, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, told the BBC Sunday programme: ”This is the will of God almighty. It is this aspect that is beyond us. Allah knows best. None of us is going to live for an indefinite period. Death always takes place but what form it takes is always beyond us. People of faith need to have a very firm belief in God almighty. It is for God’s will. It is for the betterment of mankind at large.”
But Fergus Stokes, a former priest turned humanist, said that Christians and other believers were trying to have it both ways: ”Either God has a hand in the fishbowl, in which case you can pray to him, or he doesn’t.”
”There is some kind of inbuilt desire to hang on to supernatural forces. More and more, religion is not working for people and supernatural explanations rarely help.”
Other voices
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales
It is a challenge to faith but it doesn’t take faith away because we still believe in God. Every life, however short, is very precious and the love engendered in that person’s life comes from God and that love is not in vain but continues because death is not the end. Catholics and other Christians react with faith: they turn to God and they pray and somehow they trust that prayers and belief in an omnipotent God will bring good out of seeming evil and senselessness.
Dr Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi
Although we believe in God’s involvement in history if we stop to ask why did this happen, we might come to accept tragedy instead of fighting against it.
Judaism is an attempt not to ask why but then, what should I do? How can I help?
I don’t think we can begin to ask why. The message is that we all belong together. We must put our efforts into saving life. We believe God needs our help to help those who suffer.
Shaunaka Rishi Das, director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
To blame God is infantile. It is about accepting personal responsibility and the truth which is that you are not the centre of the universe. You should not be thinking you are in charge. We are not going to stop this kind of thing happening and it is not important to try. We must try to realise our own perfection rather than trying to make the world perfect – that’s not going to happen. We have chosen to enter a realm in which suffering exists. We are doomed to suffering and death. This does not reflect on our relationship with God.
Tom Wright, Anglican Bishop of Durham
There is a sense of a very, strange, dark, presence of God, being at the heart of the storm, not to make the world all right for those who happen to say a prayer at the right moment, but to be with us in the mess.
That is precisely what the Gospel writers are getting at when they write of Christ on the cross crying out: ‘Why have you forsaken me?’
It is the church’s job to be there in prayer in order that God himself will be there too. God himself is groaning at the heart of that agony. – Guardian Unlimited Â