“What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” Crow Foot (1830 - 1890) Chief of Black Foot First Nation
(from Butterly Against the Wind, Tiokasin Ghosthorse)
18 years ago this winter, a massive tsunami with waves up to 30 meters high devastated the coastlines of SouthEast Asia, killing an estimated 228,000 people in 14 countries, in one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history.
In the aftermath, a rash of “Where was God” editorials appeared in the western media. This was peculiar, because from my experience, media people lean heavily toward atheism. Commentators rhetorically if not seriously asked how a supreme being could have allowed thousands to die in such a manner.
On the matter of personal, earthly, or cosmic catatrophes, the “Where was God” trope appears insoluble for all but atheists, who insist there’s no mystery, since nothing had anywhere to go to in the first place.
For those who believe in a deity in charge of cosmic affairs, there are two possible options, faithwise. One is to appeal to an omniscient, Captain Kirk-like creator who sees every sparrow that falls but follows a Prime Directive to stay out of minor messes on a tiny rocky planet in the suburbs of an average galaxy.
The other is to consider God as a practitioner of tough love, sending thousands to early graves as part of some divine plan we cannot fathom.
Lisbon, 1755
This theological puzzle (or non-puzzle) of Deadbeat Dad has a long pedigree. On the morning of November 1, 1755, Father Manual Portal awoke from a nightmare in which Lisbon was destroyed in an earthquake. He went to mass and prayed. A few hours later his monastery was in ruins, just as he had dreamed, from a massive earthquake.
“Tens of thousands of pious citizens were on their knees in their Churches on the All Saints’ Day of 1755, listening to the familiar exhortations to rejoice in praise of their Lord, when they felt the first faint shuddering of the earth beneath them,” writes Otto Friedrich in his history of apocalyptic beliefs, The End of the World.
The earthquake was centered just offshore of Portugal, but it caused tremendous damage hundreds of miles inland, burying thousands in church rubble. So where was God? Was he not listening to the prayers before the earthquake struck, and if so, why the nonintervention? Or worse, active role in plate tectonics?
In the 4th century AD, St. Augustine penned The City of God as part of his struggle with how Rome could have fallen to the barbarians after, not before, it was Christianized. (His solution was that the real city is to be found in eternal Heaven and not on the corruptible Earth). From desert fathers to papal encyclicals, there’s a long history of theological hairsplitting over God’s whereabouts, tracing back to a Jewish proto-hippie’s questioning cry on a cross at Golgotha: “Why has Thou forsaken me?”
So when secular mediamakers play the “Where Was God” card in response to a natural disaster, it’s obviously welcoming conceptual twists and turns worthy of an Escher print.
The First Noble Truth and the Lofty Mosquito
Suffering is inescapable in life; that’s Buddha’s First Noble Truth. It’s no accident that Buddhism and Hinduism, the religions of impermanence and transformation, took hold in monsoon-battered Southeast Asia. The Buddhist Sutras, and Vedic texts like the Bhagavad Gita, have much to say about accepting change as inevitable.
First Worlders get no special exemption in the radical change business, of course. In an Harpers article that ran prior to the 2004 tsunami, writer Tom Bissell discouraged the idea that geo-catastrophes are something that only happens “to primitive peoples in far-off lands.” He called it “a highly callous form of disaster denial, for yesterday’s village-erasing lava flow in Sumatra is tomorrow's super-eruption in British Columbia.”
And consider this scarifying factoid as a countermeasure to human hubris, religious or secular. Demographers estimate of the 108 billion people who have lived, mosquitoes have killed almost half of them - 52 billion - most of them young children.
A hymn comes to mind, courtesy Monty Python:
Source with a Capital S
In his influential 1972 book The Denial of Death, Ernst Becker argued that much of western culture can be read as a massive collective effort to transcend, defy, or even deny death. Though his book is now heavily dated by its appeal to Freudian psychology, I think Becker’s essential point is correct. We’re likely the only creatures on Earth conscious of a best-before date, and that’s the source of our greatest cognitive dissonance of all. From this dark soil grows our arts, religion and even science, groping for that which is true and timeless.
Gues you could say we’re all peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity, working with what glimpses we can get. To alter Einstein slightly, the light behind appearances is subtle but it’s not malicious. Human beings address it in prayer, beckon to it with music, target it with particle accelerators and observatories, and stumble after it with the butterly net of words and the mason jar of theory. Source with a capital S is intuited all over the world by the incurably curious, whether they hail from the sciences, religion or the arts. The approach may be different in each field of endeavour, but the universal feeling of a connection to something vastly bigger than the “skin-encapsulated ego” suggests there is some objective referent.
What is it? Don’t know. Does it listen to prayer? Beats me. That said, I have more to say on in the next installment on the intersection between science and spirituality, and the tension between the world as it is understood and the world as it’s felt.
Geoff, you've taken on the Big Questions, and I admire you for that. Looking forward to the next instalment. I have a permanent image of that awful tsunami in my head; it's one of the most bizarre pictures I have ever seen. And it stuck...
Some of us have perfect pitch, others have relative pitch, and others still are hopelessly tone deaf.