Faith and Suffering

Where was God in all those Times of Suffering?

Fundamentalists will say that God caused it to warn or to punish or perhaps just to
show his power. Intelligent believers and non-believers must surely see this
interpretation as meaningless. Non-believers will be confirmed in their atheism and
believers will find themselves defending a monster called ‘God’. To call a tsunami an
act of God leads in this direction. It all calls to mind Chesterton’s description of some
religious persons who have “the blinding clarity of a madman”, who simplistically see
God’s direct action in everything. Irish Augustinian Gabriel Daly reminds us that the
question of how God acts in the world is one of the thorniest in theology. To see
God's relationship with the world as that of a clock maker, a clock minder and a
clock-winder is a byroad to unbelief. Sometimes there is no need to call human
catastrophe an act of God. Human, participation is clear enough: When people die
from starvation in Africa, perhaps it is because of selfishness, waste and obesity in
the developed world. When children in Darfur are deprived of their fathers, we can
blame the cruelty of their northern government. When thousands are washed off
their island homes in Bangladesh in the rainy season, maybe those of us who are
anti-refugee share some of the blame. But an Indian Ocean earthquake does not
have a human origin. No one can be blamed - except perhaps God! Earthquakes and
tsunami waves pose real questions to believers. So too does the birth of a
handicapped baby. So too does the death of a loved spouse or devoted parent.
Undeserved suffering is always an uncomfortable question for believers. Does God
cause or permit the suffering? Or the other aspect of the same question--how is God
almighty and also all loving? If God could have prevented this, why did his love not
do so? Whatever the answer, it certainly cannot be that God caused it. Who could
say this to fatherless children in Sumatra, or to a Sri Lankan father who lost his wife
and six children or to the Indian mother whose husband is missing. Neither can we
side-step the question by saying simplistically that it is all part of God's plan. The
facts test the hearts of believers even more than it tests the minds of unbelievers.
The biblical scholars have rescued us from a literal belief that God plagued the people
of Egypt to favour those he has chosen. Nor can we believe that God helped the
Israelites to slay the Cananite children because he loved the Israelites more. Even to
formulate this question about God's action in the world implies a deeper question,
who or what is God? The great theologians are humble in their answers. They were
people of faith before they were theologians. Thomas Aquinas spoke, about order
and design in the universe and concluded that there must exist someone whom we all
call God. And yet he said we do not know what God is. Augustine warned that when
we say we know God, it is not God we know. More recently, the great Protestant
theologian Karl Barth said that when we think about God we blaspheme, and that
when we speak of God we blaspheme twice. God does not fit into our heads nor can
God be captured in words. If God is God, God is incomprehensible. We pray in our
liturgy -- "God alone is holy”. Holy means completely other, entirely apart, infinitely
free from human imperfection or limitation. This otherness and this
incomprehensibility of God shrinks all simplistic questions about God's action or
inaction in the world. Faith in God's action is not because of the evidence; it is often
in spite of the evidence. And in more recent years, Canadian philosopher and
theologian Bernard Lonergan tells us that faith and doubt go together. Faith is not
about certainty as usually understood; it is about trust, as Martin' Luther reminded us.
When Jesus, having collided with corrupt religious leaders, was dying on the cross, he
experienced and expressed doubt--"My God; my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Faith and Suffering

His personal tsunami had hit him. The experience of tested faith was modelled for
believers at that moment. The spirit of God in him enabled him to say--"Into your
hands I commend my spirit". In other words, "I trust you". This intelligent trust is not
an explanation but for believers it is an answer. Victor Frankl was asked, "Can
anyone believe God after Auschwitz?" He replied, saying that when many of his fellow
Jews and Christian friends were being herded into the gas chambers, he heard them
reciting the Shema or the Our Father. Then he reversed the question -"Could anyone
not believe in God after Auschwitz?" Faith may not explain suffering but it is often the
only answer. But any naive belief in the immediacy of God--`God is doing this’ or,
‘God is doing that', ‘This is an act of God' -is dangerous language: It is a claim to
have God at the end of a telephone. Tsunamis will wash this simplistic faith away.
Before the human tragedies of terminal illness, of personal loss or of tsunamis,
believers can only say, `Into your hands I commend My spirit', while they work to
make this a less stressful world. Until hardworking scientists succeed in controlling or
preventing disasters on our planet and beyond, any naive faith that calls these
disasters acts of God easily lead to unbelief. It is much more accurate and credible to
say that God is in every situation, in the mess of human suffering, and feels our pain:
We cannot claim to know precisely how. This act of faith is then tested by our
willingness to do our share in relieving the suffering caused by tsunamis and other
painful experiences in human lives.

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