Natural disasters make us stop and think about the human condition

I HAVE been thinking lately about a tragedy that occurred a few months ago where I come from.

A little boy, a much-cherished only child, was killed in a driving accident. I remember feeling that this must be the worst fate that could befall a parent. These days we wonder if there is an even more grievous situation where families are left clueless about the fate of their beloved, not knowing whether they are happy or sad, alive or dead.

It's not surprising that we get to thinking about the big questions, about whether there is a meaning to life, whether there is a God, and why does he allow suffering.

It shouldn't have required the tsunami to get us talking about these things. Because what is the tsunami but one of these common, everyday tragedies writ large? It's the perennial problem of human suffering, but with a larger cast of actors. The same ingredients are there: suffering and death for the victims, heartache and loneliness for the survivors.

The big questions were asked recently by Irish Times religious affairs correspondent, Patsy McGarry, in the wake of the tsunami. "Where is the God of love in all of this?" he wrote. "What have those who apologise for him to say now?" McGarry criticised those who would "uphold faith at all costs, believing that people must be protected from the true awfulness of reality".

While most people will disagree with his conclusion that "all that there is to this existence is the still, sad music of humanity," McGarry's honest and anguished piece at least lays bare the bewilderment that good people feel when disaster strikes.

And far from debunking what Christianity has to say about suffering, he does Christian belief a service by taking a blowtorch to soft-headed lines like 'God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.' Because, whatever about God being in his heaven, all is not right with the world.

To be clear about it, the tsunami has nothing to say about the existence of God. Neither evil actions nor natural disasters explain the mystery of our creation. But McGarry's article raises an important question: how can a "personal, loving God" allow human suffering to go on? If you have been to church in recent days, or heard theologians speak about the disaster in the media, you will doubtless have heard that there are 'no easy answers'.

But that line isn't really to be interpreted as, 'frightfully sorry, you've stumped us there. Caught us out rather badly, in fact. Makes a nonsense of everything we've said up to now'.

Long before Christ was crucified, religious people have been grappling with the issue of suffering particularly when that suffering is borne by the innocent. The story of Job comes at a critical moment in the Old Testament because, before Job, you just had the suffering of Adam and Eve who had brought it all on themselves, so to speak. Job was different. Here was a good man, who had always done things right, now getting it in the neck. His friends make him feel worse by saying that he must have done something wrong in the past and urging him to repent.

Those friends were a bit like Glen Hoddle, who some years ago had to resign from his job as England football manager after claiming that disabled people were 'suffering' because of wrongs committed in a past life.

In the Job story, the good man knows that he has done no wrong. He wants his innocence vindicated and his relationship with God restored. In the end, he gets both. Through a dialogue with God he comes to understand that his suffering is not the result of God's displeasure. Rather, God has made creation free beautifully so, but dangerously and unpredictably so as well.

Suffering, as bad as it is, is not so difficult to fathom when it is the inevitable consequence of man's inhumanity to man. We can understand that God could not, and should not, intervene to prevent us from doing bad things to each other. If he were to do so, we would not be truly free. We would just be puppets manipulated by an all-powerful puppet-master. All our love for each other, and every other noble sentiment that we cherish, would be meaningless. The sympathy and solidarity we show to each other in times of grief likewise would be absurd.

BUT confusion about God and suffering is more understandable when our human pain cannot be attributed to man's evil acts but to natural disasters like the tsunami, the failure of crops, or diseases such as cancer. That problem was addressed intelligently over the weekend by environmental campaigner and Columban priest Fr Sean McDonagh. "The movement of tectonic plates which causes earthquakes and volcanoes is a completely natural process," he wrote. "If they didn't exist our earth would be lifeless like Mars. There would be no flowers, birds or human friendship. It is hardly fair to blame God for natural processes which bring forth such beauty and fruitfulness and yet, necessarily, have a terrifying dimension to them." Perhaps what Fr McDonagh has put his finger on is that there is no joy without tears, no growth without pain. We can't know why nature's awesome processes go awry, why cells grow cancerous, and why children die suddenly. But Christians believe that God accomplished our salvation by accepting this human condition of suffering himself and experiencing the extreme marginalisation of feeling forsaken on the cross.

We don't have things all our own way in this world, that much is true. But Christian faith offers the reassurance that God, whatever we conceive him to be, is not laughing at our suffering, having experienced it himself for our sakes.

Besides, what would be the alternative to suffering? Our fate, after all, is to die. Do we blame God for that? Would we rather live on this earth for centuries? Do we blame God for the tears our loved ones will shed when we finally depart this life? Or would we prefer they felt no pain when we die? These questions may seem unhelpful when suffering is extreme or life is cut short unexpectedly.

But they do help us realise that suffering must be put in context. If this world is all there is, then it is indeed appalling. If the Christian version is true, however, then there is hope of transforming that suffering into acts of love and solidarity towards each other, and there is growth in our relationship with a God who shares our suffering.

Believing in and loving God will not extract the suffering out of life.

But to deny the existence of God because of human suffering isn't very logical either. It is a strange paradox that it is our ability to accept pain which makes our love authentic. The reality of that is proven every day in the all-consuming love of parents for their children. And we are seeing it in these days when people are making real and meaningful sacrifices in order to share resources with the people of Asia.