Where was God?
This question is one that is often asked in the face of immense tragedy. Where was God when the earthquake struck Haiti? Where was God in the mudslides in Madeira? Where is God when there are droughts in East Africa or floods in South East Asia? But it is also a question that we ask in the private tragedies of our own lives: in the face of the loss of a child, or the breakdown of a relationship, or the steady, dull pain of the everyday.
‘Where is God?’ is a question that arises when we look around us, and see a world full of suffering, and cannot square that with the idea of an all-loving and all-powerful deity.
One reaction to these experiences of suffering – whether public or private – is to conclude that God is not there because God is not anywhere. This is Nietzsche’s famous assertion: ‘God is dead’. People of faith might not kill God but instead end up killing off the idea of a loving God. Some might argue that suffering is a punishment for sins committed. But do we really think that that is the kind of relationship that the Creator wants to have with us the creatures? Jesus uses many images to help us understand the Creator – Father, King, Bridegroom – but He never uses the image of a Jailer or an Executioner. And even if that image of God is valid, how can we possibly imagine that the children killed in Haiti or the mother who dies of leukaemia deserve to be ‘punished’?
An alternative reaction then is to run away from the reality of suffering. To pretend that it is not real or to dress it up as something else. We encounter this in some forms of Eastern mysticism but also in a Pentecostal form of Christianity that sees this world as something to be dismissed and so its sufferings need not be taken seriously.
But in the Catholic tradition neither of these is a valid way out. We cannot run away from the reality of suffering; nor can we abandon our belief in the loving Creator God. The most significant document of last full Council of the Church (Vatican II in the 1960s) is called ‘Gaudium et Spes’. The name comes from the opening words in Latin which mean ‘joy and hope’. But we should not overlook the next few words. The full opening sentence runs thus: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of people of this age ….. these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.”
We are called to share not only the joys of our brothers and sisters but also their anxieties. That is the challenge we have been making to our MP’s through the Lenten Reflections that are being sent to them by email each day in Lent. And it is also the challenge of the Lenten Lectures that start this Wednesday evening. How do we find God in our world of suffering … in natural disasters? … in climate destruction? … in depression? … in death? These are appropriate themes for Lent, but they are also questions that we need to face throughout our lives as Christians. There may not be easy answers. But the Church demands, at least, that we take those questions seriously.
Raymond Perrier, Director
