Emergence

I've been asked several times now what I make of the tsunami disaster and God. I'm never quite sure how to answer. My first thought is that the person asking assumes that somehow my study of theology has given me faithful assurances that clarify the cause for the enormity of suffering. That assumption is wholly incorrect.

I cannot make sense of the tsunami disaster because I am not big enough. That is the plain and simple answer. Basically, I am content with my creatureliness. That means I no longer feel compelled to solve disaster mysteries with theological or philosophical words and ideas. I no longer have a desire to know how the universe was created and with what specificity and measure of justice natural selection takes place. I don't need to know because I was never meant to know.

However, there a few blessed assurances that I can share from experience, as experience can be a brutal teacher.

I know with absolute certainty one thing: as long as the sun rises and sets, God will be God, and God will ensure the gift and grace of emergence. And, I know with some measure of certitude that in the face of disaster and suffering our question should not be why, but what can I do?

The answer to that latter question does not have to be grand. It just has to be honest. Part of that honesty is the acceptance of one's smallness along with the grandeur of generosity and gratitude...Mr. Hopkins mastered this so well.

God’s Grandeur

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.