[Dialogue] Spong Tsunami and Prayer

[KroegerD@aol.com]

January 5, 2005


The Theological Message in the Destructive Tsunami 


The earthquake near Sumatra and the resulting tidal wave that have wreaked devastation in many nations on two separate continents was the final major event in the tumultuous year of 2004. The people of the world watched in stunned disbelief as television footage showed us mountains of bodies, some 30 percent of them children, and massive destruction of property caused by gigantic waves that swept over the land far beyond the beaches. Imagine the psychological impact of this event on such nations as Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan. To put this trauma into perspective recall the numbing pain inflicted on the psyche of America on 9/11 when this nation of almost 300,000,000 people lost about 3,000 lives in a terrorist attack. The healing of these wounds is still unfinished. Yet a single town in Indonesia or Sri Lanka lost ten times that many in this Tsunami. The estimate of lives lost has climbed quickly each day until it has now reached a staggering total beyond 150,000. I doubt the exact number of deaths will be known for some time, but surely most of those now listed as missing will ultimately come to rest in the deaths column. This event, like all natural disasters, forces upon the people of the world a new and scary consciousness. Once the trauma has passed that new consciousness will frame new, ultimate and very human questions that will be unavoidable.

This planet, our scientists tell us, is some four and a half billion years old. In its life span it has often not been a safe place for any living thing. During its first billion or so years, no life existed on this planet. Instead a constant barrage of meteorites and other particles of an exploding universe relentlessly pounded the earth's surface. Nature's raw violence was visible in the liquefied rock boiling near the center of the earth.

As recently as 200 million years ago, the landmass on this planet formed a single continent. What is now North and South America nestled into Europe and Africa. Australia was the underbelly of India and Antarctica was the southern edge of this single landmass. Over a vast span of time violent earthquakes miles beneath the sea have broken up that landmass into the continents that we identify today. Those calamitous events, however, occurred before there was an inhabitant who could knowingly record or be victimized by them.

No sense of tragedy was associated with the force of nature until some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago when our earliest, self-conscious ancestors finally emerged through the evolutionary process. Only then were there living beings whose minds enabled them to embrace time as a connected flowing whole. They could remember the past and anticipate the future, which meant that the uniquely human dimension of chronic anxiety entered the life of this world. Expanded knowledge enables us to know that yesterday's violence might well return again tomorrow. The natural forces of storm, hurricane and earthquake were so intense that these creatures trembled in fear before their power and sought to placate whoever or whatever was in control of these forces that appeared to victimize them. Human survival required that we become aware of nature's power without being immobilized by it. Had we not been able to make that adjustment the evolutionary step that brought us self-consciousness would have been aborted and life would have devolved back to the beasts of the field existing in a world of unknowing.

Finding a way to deal with this trauma was the catalyst that caused primitive religion to be born. Our vulnerable ancestors survived by envisioning a powerful supernatural being, who was big enough to control the forces of nature and who was our ally. That was when human beings assumed that those devastating forces of nature were either expressions of this God's power or events that occurred at the divine bidding. So, a contract with God, sometimes called a covenant, was formed. Human beings were compelled by their need for security to discern and obey the divine will and to please this supernatural being with respectful liturgies. That is why every human religious system has developed codes of conduct that are said to have been dictated by God. That is also why every human religious system has produced traditions of worship that must be adhered to in the minutest detail. Natural disasters were inevitably understood as to be expressions of divine wrath. Primitive religious leaders devoted their efforts to determining exactly what human beings had done to provoke the divine anger. A consensus would be formed around some conclusions and a reformation would be instituted designed to express both penitence and new resolve to please God in the future. Fortunately, for these human interpreters, natural disasters were widely scattered in time so that the illusion could be preserved, that the adopted changes were successful and God was pleased to be their protector once again.

Our religious traditions still reflect this mindset. God, according to the Bible, controlled the rain, wind, lightning, thunder and all natural disasters, using them to punish sin and to reward righteousness. The psalmists reminded their readers that God set the boundaries for the oceans and rivers. The waters escaped those boundaries only at God's instigation. Even as our ancestors in faith died in the great disasters of history, their deaths had meaning since God had a divine purpose in each tragedy. It was a comforting thought. Our forebears used the structures of their supernatural religion to keep their debilitating fears in check. This idea no longer works for modern people, which means that when tragedy strikes, our peculiar destiny is to wrestle with the new issue of potential meaninglessness.

Nothing reveals this modern dilemma more clearly than the way this current tragedy has been interpreted by the public media. God has not been mentioned once as a causative factor of the Tsunami. This means that far more than we recognize consciously, God understood as the supernatural, controlling presence, is no longer a working hypothesis in our increasingly secular world. Richard Norton Smith on PBS did refer to "the almost biblical proportions" of this disaster. He did not tell us to what he was referring by his use of the word "biblical" but I suspect his reference was either to the flood story at the time of Noah or to the destruction that shall accompany the end of the world that the Bible has projected into the future.

Instead of God being discussed as a factor in this disaster the media introduced us to geological explanations. Earthquakes are caused by the collisions of tectonic plates far below the sea. We learned that this particular tragedy occurred when the displacement initiated by the thrusting of the Indian plate beneath the Burma plate created waves so powerful that they devastated nearby nations and sent 30-foot surges to pound the east coast of Africa half a globe away. We were informed that there is today an active fault line under the Canary Islands off West Africa that has the potential to erupt, sending half a trillion tons of rock into the Atlantic Ocean that could create tidal waves capable of pounding America's shores with water heights larger than the skyscrapers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami. Only human beings are equipped to live with the knowledge of their own potential destruction. The sheep will not worry about this pending tragedy. The cows will continue to chew their cuds and the rabbits will keep on breeding. To be human is to embrace our frightening world and to know that we cannot make it secure. Our assertion that God is in charge is little more than another attempt to keep the delusion of our security in tact.

One cannot appeal to the idea of a supernatural deity who controls our destinies in the face of the raw and indiscriminate power of the Tsunami that hurls bodies into a watery grave without rhyme or reason. The modern conclusion is that there is no sky God directing the affairs of nature. So desperate is our anxiety, so deep is our need to believe that such a protector is there that we say astonishingly naïve things about this God. We talk as if we have actually captured the will of God, through an 'infallible Pope or an inerrant Bible.' We know, however, that these relics from the childhood of our humanity do not hold water, that they are nothing but pathetic coping devices to shield us from the terror of being aware that we are at the mercy of forces over which we know that we have no control.

This event, happening west of Sumatra - miles beneath the oceans, makes it very clear that no angry God decided to victimize the world. There is only impersonal, natural power, oblivious to human concerns. This natural disaster reminds us that the military might of a single nation, even one with vast nuclear capacity, is like fools' gold when it comes to protecting the world from nature's fury. It also confronts us with the frightening necessity of abandoning the supernatural God of yesterday, who allowed bad things to happen only if we deserved them. Suddenly all of our attempts to build security are revealed as little more than superstitions. All we can finally depend on in this world is our own fragile humanity and human life is inextricably bound together in a common destiny. The theological challenge that rises inevitably in this crisis is the awareness that we alone are our neighbor's keeper.

Can human life survive without the security of a divine protector? Or will that realization prove to be our Achilles' heel as we turn out to be like the dinosaurs that bloomed for but a moment in cosmic time and then disappeared when they could not adapt to a new environment? The only alternative to this bleak picture is that this tragedy will drive us into a new consciousness that will produce a radically different way to view both God and our own humanity. Those are the issues posed as Mother Nature sends us reeling into the year 2005. I will seek to address these issues in my column next week.

-- John Shelby Spong


Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Carl from Colorado Springs, Colorado, asks: 

In a non-theist world is there a place for prayer? What is it? How does it look? 

Dear Carl, 

Everywhere I go to lecture across the world, your question is almost always the first question to be posed. I think that is for two reasons: 1. Prayer is an all but universal human experience. 2. Prayer is the ultimate link to the deity we yearn to have protect us in this vast and sometimes apparently empty universe.

When I try to describe or point to a God-experience that does not fall inside the boundaries of the traditional God definition, many of my hearers seem to feel the angst of both loneliness and potential meaninglessness. The role of God, understood as a supernatural being who dwells somewhere beyond the boundaries of this earth, who intervenes to accomplish the divine purpose and who answers our prayers, is our bulwark against that vision of nothingness. So when this understanding of God wavers, so does our understanding of prayer. That, in turn, drives us, I believe, to seek assurance or reassurance.

To begin to address this concern we must, first, examine what these assumptions say about both God and prayer. The God we speak of appears to be in our employ and can, therefore, direct our destinies. That inevitably means that the theistic God is bound to disappoint us for that is finally not the way the world works. Neither God nor prayer saves our loved ones from death in Iraq. Neither God nor prayer will reverse the progress of an inevitable death-producing disease. Neither God nor prayer will change the weather or cause mental illness to decline. Neither God nor prayer will cause one's stocks to rise or guarantee a victory in the lottery. Neither God nor prayer will enable a nation to defeat its enemy. A theistic understanding of both God and prayer has been dying since the writing of Isaac Newton. It was pushed into oblivion by the work of Louis Pasteur. The theistic God to whom people tend to pray began to fade when the size of the universe was discovered in the work of Copernicus and Galileo and God's dwelling place above the sky was obliterated. It was further pushed into decline by the work of Charles Darwin who demonstrated the power of natural selection above supernatural guidance in the evolution of life on this planet. It disappeared from view for man when Sigmund Freud revealed how neurotic most God talk is and when Albert Einstein reduced all talk, including God talk, to relativity.

The question we need to ask, however, is this: When a long-standing human idea of God dies, does that mean that God dies? Of course not! It only means that one of our human definitions of God has proved to be so inadequate that this definition has died. Does this mean that prayer has become meaningless? No! It only means that a particular understanding of prayer has become inoperative. Only those who cannot envision God outside the categories of theism will have problems with prayer.

God is so much bigger than our image of God, and prayer is far more than asking a divine Santa Claus for a favor. We have work to do in this area but to loosen the ties of past theological thinking is clearly the first step. It would take more space than a question and answer column can provide, but let me assure you that I believe in God deeply and I pray everyday. How I understand both my belief in God and the way I pray, I tried to spell out in my book: A New Christianity for a New World. I wish you well on your journey.

-- John Shelby Spong


-- 
Dick Kroeger