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The Tsunami and God

Richard Rohr, OFM

So many have asked me to write my thoughts on the tsunami holocaust, and I only do it with fear and hesitation, and little hope of “success.” Who am I to explain the ways of God? What is this mystery of human suffering? Why does God allow such absurdity, pain, and injustice? Each religion and each believer seems to have a different answer, although many of us have just gone numb.

As one woman wrote me “one sees it as a punishment, another as a test, another as a balancing of karma, and another as a mystery to be accepted and not understood. Most alarming are those who see this (almost gleefully) as a sign of ‘end-times’ approaching.” Obviously, I myself would be closest to the “mystery” answer, which many feel is just a cop out; but it is the only answer that I hear from the tangent of Scripture, from mystics of all religions, and finally from mature believers.

Your answer, and the answer that will be helpful to you, depends on the “frame” inside of which you read reality. I said in Hope Against Darkness that there are three major perspectives that make up your total window on reality: your world-image, your God-image, and your-self image. They are largely operating unconsciously in most of our lives. I guess in this case, I would also have to add a fourth: one’s “eschatological”-image. Forgive the big word, but it just means “Where do you think this is all heading?” What is the final goal of history? And in religious language, “What is the spiritual end that we are all heading toward?” This eschatological perspective might be the best one to help us frame or reframe this disaster. If you know the final end, you can make some possible sense of the means and the path.

If the “eschatological” goal of history is that all things come into free and conscious union with God (and that is what I believe), then the how, when, where of that is entirely up to God’s Providence and good will. We are all being saved in spite of ourselves, so do not look for some pattern of perfect order—which is the usual illusion of both very religious people and atheists, and why they both can become so rigid. God seems to have the flexibility and freedom to live with disorder.

If nothing else, tragic events do force us to bring our operative images to consciousness. Who is God? What is it all for? What does it mean to be human on this earth? Tragedy brings us into the human struggle in very concrete ways, which is the only way that people do come to high levels of consciousness, freedom, and even love. Now I admit, that is small consolation to someone who has lost family and home in this disaster. They would willingly remain unconscious and unfree, if this is the price. But what about love? We are certainly seeing its outpouring in a truly global compassion, probably unmatched in human history. Is this a way for us to realize we are one world, and not just these warring, self-interested nations?

Freedom in nature is an all-or-nothing decision on God’s part. If the created world is really free to take its course, then God cannot step in sometimes and not step in others, or the world becomes whimsical, scary, and incoherent. The very existence of science is based on this observation. God clearly does not stop every chilly wind that you and I deem uncomfortable, or every rain that ruins a Papal Mass. God normally does not stop the natural progression of healing nor the natural progression of cancer either (*).

As some have said, evil is live spelled backwards. The patterns of evolution and devolution are inherent. God does not seem to intervene in the small things, which we can understand. But we get damn angry and mistrustful when God does not stop the big evils. From our frame, it clearly becomes a tragic and unjust universe. And it is. The story of Job made that very clear.

So the only answer I can give is the one that was given to Job. Yahweh, in effect, says to him:

1) I am listening.
2) You do matter to me.
3) The struggle itself is key, and even good.
4) There is a meaning to the universe.
5) I know your suffering and can work with it, if you let me in.
6) Even though you cannot trust what you see, you can trust me.
7) This psychic/spiritual relationship is often the beginning of Divine Intimacy.

This disordered universe, nature itself, and the disorder of our own minds and hearts, is all being drawn into an order not of our making. Disorder is the same as freedom, you know. God took the great risk of making us free, and also kept it for Himself, which he then uses in our favor. Remember, mercy itself is the essence of divine disorder. Forgiveness is God breaking God’s own rules, but for our good!

All I know is that the Biblical revelation is saying that through all of the mess and disorder of history, God is committed to a loving and saving response to all that God created. God holds himself to the rules of the created order during the ordeal of time, but allows himself what Julian of Norwich calls “a final great deed”. I will call it, God’s great escape clause, God’s perfect and total freedom. I don’t know what else would be worthy of a God who is “glorious, victorious, and unsurpassable,” as the Psalms say. Acts 3:21 calls this final deed “the universal restoration.” (If you want to see this belief developed brilliantly, read If Grace is True by Gulley and Mulholland). As Blessed John Duns Scotus taught, “Decuit, Potuit, Fecit.” If it is fitting, and it is possible, then God will do it.

Belief in the final judgment has God saying “I will not intervene until the end.” But the real point is to leave room for God’s final and complete victory. Wait and see how God will break all the rules of logic, and order, and merit, and justice, and who deserves what, and who has suffered more or less. We will “know the meaning of salvation through the forgiveness” of everything! (Luke 1:77). God’s almightiness is precisely in the realm of mercy.

Finally, all creation will see God’s full power to save. Our sufferings and deaths will be a drop and a passing moment in a final tsunami of forgiveness. Our hope is cosmic.

(*) I am not doubting nor denying God’s power to heal, which I have personally witnessed many times.