The Indian Ocean disaster and God’s will

By Fr. Alexis Vinogradov

Typically, after every major disaster, newscasters bring religious spokesmen on board to answer that great existential question: “If there is a God, WHY?” At one point or another, every person has or will ask this question. Many will find and live with their own answers. Many will discard “childish theories” about God’s “will” and jettison God in the process. They will yield to the fate of man as an insignificant pawn at the mercy of the forces of nature.

But what if we put our questions first in a different way? What is a greater tragedy—one mother losing her child, or ten mothers losing their children? Certainly, for each mother, her loss is the greatest possible tragedy of cosmic proportions. Infinite pain is infinite pain; you can’t make it bigger or smaller through multiplication. In Christian consciousness, each human life is regarded as having supreme and irreplaceable value, and therefore the loss of any human life is a cosmic tragedy, a source of infinite grief.

The media thrives on sensational news—news of numerical significance: huge explosions, tidal waves, great military actions, transactions and deals and crimes involving millions of dollars. One child dying of leukemia is not considered news; big deal—kids die every day. But in the Christian feeling and sensibility for the world, it is a big deal! God suffers and hurts for every child who dies, and we are told that 25,000 of them die of malnutrition on this planet every day. But this doesn’t make the news.

Our question about God’s will, God’s plan, or God’s “fairness” never arises when things go well with us, as long as we are personally safe. Unless something hits us close to home, numerical tragedy seems to be the only “alarm” that awakens the question in us. Is that a defect in God or in us? We can play the game of putting ourselves in God’s place and seeing how far we get, and there are some folks who would make sure that only evil people got hurt or face illness or die. That would certainly end the question of why “good” people suffer. So a tidal wave would sweep away an evil man and neatly shimmy around the good guy standing two feet away. Let’s imagine the chaos of nature and microbes and viruses that would “choose” their victims (or is it that, if we were God, we would select the victims we wanted hurt!).

The Christian understands that the book of Genesis depicts the ideal understanding of man in relation to God and nature: perfect harmony, perfect unity, perfect peace. But it reveals this perfection within an order given by the Creator. Every created being and thing is a “word” of God that returns fulfilled to the One Who speaks the word. It is a word fulfilled when it is obedient to its true nature. Among all created “words,” only human beings have the freedom and choice to respond, to speak back with a word of acceptance or with a word of rejection, to fulfill their true nature or to deform it. But this ability, given to humans alone, is an enormous risk on God’s part, because unless man’s response is in perfect harmony with God’s word to all of nature, man has the power to set all of nature into disorder. This is the risk God has taken in making us in His own image, in freedom and in love, and to have dominion over creation.

Ever since the spoiled innocence of Genesis, the history of man, his relationship to God, and his relationship to all of creation is the fruit of this choice, the fruit of man’s response. Our profound unity to all things and with one another is so deep that, as Saint Gregory says, not one stone falls into the ocean without rippling to the other side of the world. Choices. All the choices humans have ever made have had enormous cosmic consequences. Each day, in every city, there is a page in every local newspaper over which we glide casually—the obituary page. Every name on this page should remind us daily of the great tragedy of man’s fall and serve as a witness to what Saint Paul calls “the last great enemy, Death.”

No matter how a person’s life is extinguished, in the Christian world view, there is no such thing as euthanasia—in Greek, a “good death”—even for an elderly lady of 96 years. No one dies of “natural” causes, because the nature that God creates has no death in it; He is “not the God of the dead, but the God of the living” [Mark 12:27].

Tsunamis, suicide bombings, famines, diseases, AIDS, train wrecks, wars, genocides. These are only manifestations of degree in numbers, of the one basic deformation in creation, the one thing that God did not will—death. We humans can get used to obituaries, to war stories and reports of major catastrophes, and launch right back into our occupations and vacations and meals in restaurants. On a certain level that we fight hard not to admit, we know that our occupations and preoccupations are merely a temporary diversion until the next tragedy comes to visit. But we constantly cheer each other on, praise one another’s achievements, build great future careers, and work very hard at getting used to the rumble of death in the background. We don’t want to see, as Father Alexander Schmemann wrote, that the world has become one great “cosmic cemetery.” But God doesn’t get used to it. At the grave of His friend Lazarus, it is God, in the person of Jesus Christ, Who weeps over the death of His friend!

If this were the end of the story of man’s freedom and its consequences, we would be, in the words of Saint Paul, “the most to be pitied” [1 Corinthians 15:19], because at each death we would keep returning to the same unsolvable questions. Within that story, however, there is one, and uniquely one, “good death” in the whole of human history. If we can grasp the cosmic significance of that one unique death, only then can we escape death’s interminable and absolutely certain victory. Without understanding that one “good death,” there remains only one answer to all of our great plans: “It’s only a question of time, but in the end, we are all dead.”

No science or meditation philosophy that divides life into the physical and spiritual, nor any afterlife theory, nor theories of retribution (getting even!), have filled the great hole in the human heart, and no amount of busy work can mask the hollow, persistent pulse of death. Each heartbeat, each breath, is one less beat and breath we will ever take. We make small temporary replicas of paradise—a long vacation, a good meal, a concert with friends, a beautiful feast, a new car, falling in love. And on sad gray days, when the phone is silent, we wonder how we could have believed, and death sweeps by like clockwork to steal our smile, our joy.

Two thousand years ago, into this endless cycle of little paradises and inevitable deaths, came one Man to face death, to make war on death itself. We dying humans make war on other dying humans: we kill them a little before their time, and in time we will die and they will be already dead—big victory! We think that, because we still live, we are good people, and that the ones we killed are bad people. But this one Man, this Jesus, came, not to differentiate these false categories of good and bad—to one questioner He responded, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good, except One!”—but to put an end to the real “enemy” that destroys them both.

Death is not simply the cessation of biological activity. The great enemy is the spiritual death that has resulted in physical death. And if the spiritual death of Adam (and therefore of all humankind) is to live disconnected from the only Source of life—from God—then the perfect human, Jesus, restores that connection and reveals that a willing and obedient physical death cannot ultimately destroy both the spiritual and the physical man. He becomes for all of us who freely unite with Him, the One Whom Saint Paul calls the “first-fruits from the dead” [1 Corinthians 15:20]. It is this Man’s death that can be said to be the one unique “good death,” because it is the only one that changes death, once and for all, as the Paschal song announces: “trampling down death by death!”

It is finally only by looking intently at those who live and die in Christ that we can have some inkling of this amazing power and victory of Jesus’ willing death. In the west, Saint Francis of Assisi, and in the east, Saint Seraphim of Sarov, are among the more intense examples of this transfiguration. Early in life, both men chose to die to their human self-sufficiency, to thinking, as we all do, that we can live by our own resources. In their extreme, Christ-like, and total abandonment to God, they found complete unity with all nature and humanity around them. Wild animals ate from their hands, and their hearts burned with love for all things. This is not to say that they were loved by all in return; in fact, each received a measure of the hatred that evil men had for Christ. But both forged an image of immense freedom, and above all, the freedom from death, and showed us what the priestmonk Roman Braga calls “the ability to live in eternity, even now, in this world.”

In the specific example of the Indian Ocean “crisis,” we can largely see how the commercially induced pressure to develop and use coastal land (primitive peoples knew instinctively to live farther inland) inevitably exposed large human populations to disaster, as did enormous office towers in western capitalist centers. How does one ask God the question “Why” in the face of such all-too-human hubris?

God has placed the questions “why” and “how” into our hands; it is easy to turn around and to place these questions before Him. In Paradise, Adam says to God: “Lord, it’s the fault of the woman You gave to me….” Here, in this one turn of phrase, is the beginning of the human tragedy. And so today, when TV host Larry King asks wise religious leaders why God allows death, it is that same assertion of Adam that returns to the table. Perhaps it is possible that the question remains because today there are very few Seraphims and Francises to show us, not through dry theological statements, but through the force of life and joy, the power of Hosea and Saint Paul’s cry: “O Death where is thy sting, where is thy victory?”

Fr. Vinogradov is rector of St. Gregory the Theologian Church, Wappingers Falls, NY.