�鶹��

Available for over a year

Good morning. A woman called Saida Bodchih is one of thousands of victims of the Moroccan earthquake. She told a journalist of her fears for her family, because her badly injured husband is their breadwinner. ‘We have no house to take him to and have had no food since yesterday,’ she said. ‘We can rely on nobody but God.’ Earthquakes belong among those natural disasters that are referred to in legal documents as ‘acts of God’, because they are beyond human causation or control. Underlying this legal-ese is a disturbing theological proposition: the idea that God intervenes in the natural order of things, in ways that cause vast human suffering and loss. Many religious believers would dismiss such ideas as theologically indefensible. One can have faith in a personal God without believing in a God who intervenes in the natural order, or who responds in a direct and obvious way to human prayers and demands. I’m wary of any attempt to justify or rationalise faith when confronted by the dark and violent aspects of nature, or by extremes of human suffering. The Book of Job confounds those who seek to give theological or moral explanations for suffering. Yet for me, that woman speaking of her dependence on God from the midst of the earthquake expresses something of the essence of faith, that I find hard to put into words. I love William Blake’s poem, “The Divine Image”, which transcends every adornment of doctrine, creed and religion: “To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love, all pray in their distress”. Some Christians are disdainful of those who never go to church or express any interest in religion, and who only pray when they’re in situations of extreme distress. Yet I wonder if that may be the truest and purest kind of prayer. There’s a paradox at the heart of the Christian faith, that divine revelation is hidden in all that is small, weak and insignificant. Acts of God do not announce themselves as such, and we should be wary of any who claim that they do. Simone Weil wrote that ‘God can only be present in creation under the form of absence.’ On the cross, Jesus cries out ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In so many places and in so many ways, that howl of forsakenness goes up from the ashes and ruins of our world. The task of theology is not to explain away or silence that most intense of all prayers, but to create a space wherein it can be heard. The act of God is not in the earthquake, but in that quiet, despairing voice speaking out of the ruins. ‘We can rely on nobody but God.’