Soon after the tragedy of the tsunamis in the Indian Ocean, some people began to ask: "How could God allow such massive suffering to happen?" It isn't an easy question to answer. Why is life the way it is? Why do we get ill, old, and die? Why is there divorce? Why are some people violent? Why do children suffer?
I have never been satisfied with any answer to these questions. What I do know is that the life in front of us is all that we have. It is not all that we would hope for, and it is not fully comprehensible. Yet life is a wonderful gift, full of possibilities. I'd rather have it as it is than not have it at all.
A more educated image might be God as an invisible reality, personal, good, creating and sustaining. But to ask why God would make so many people suffer makes God sound like a human grandfather toying with life from the clouds. What if we were to imagine God, as Thomas Aquinas and many Eastern religions say, as unknown and hidden? Deus absconditus. What if we were to apply the famous words from the Tao Te Ching to our idea of God: "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." What if we were to consider what the great theologian Paul Tillich meant when he spoke of the God beyond theism, or the big-hearted Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when he spoke of living as though God were not a factor, in the presence of God? What about Meister Eckhart saying, "No one knows what God is," or Hildegard of Bingen -- "You are alive in everything and yet you are unknown to us."
Perhaps if we didn't anthropomorphize God so much, we would have a different reaction to natural disasters like the tsunamis. We might have an inkling of the divinity hidden in the folds of nature, not a rosey-cheeked grandfather but a mysterious source of life that emanates a world that is complete only with the beauty and fury of nature. We might learn to protect ourselves and perhaps develop a sufficiently mature world community for that purpose. Because life is always going to be a challenge with its grace and its destructiveness.
"Anthropomorphize" means to morph God into a human. As Aquinas and other theologians say, we have to use analogies and metaphors to express a portion of our conception of God. But we should be careful not to morph the divinity out of God. We could do a better job with the language we use. It would especially help to get the sentimentality out of it, which makes God a puppet of the human mind.
The religions of the world often suggest that God is one but that community is not far away from the essence of the divine. In Buddhism, the sangha or community is essential. In Islam, the community of followers is the heart of the religion with a strong focus on the one God. In polytheism, the divine is imagined as a richly diverse community. And even in Christianity, the image of the Trinity suggests that somehow, mysteriously, God is a community, although at the same time Christians believe ardently in monotheism. If we are fashioned in the image of the divine, if divinity flows through us at an unimaginably subtle depth, then we most reflect the divine when we act in genuine community, with diversity and individuality.
In the face of the tsunamis, I don't ask, How could a caring God allow such a dreadful thing? You don't have to be on this earth long before you learn that life is a mixture of tragedy and pleasure. My question is: Are we ever going to become religious enough to transcend our petty personal passions and make the world a real community. Why does the Pacific Ocean have warning instruments for tsunamis and not the Indian Ocean? It's a theological question about community.
We could ask the same question about the thousands of children being killed and horribly wounded in wars across the globe. This horror exists because we have not matured enough to create a world community that genuinely serves the welfare of our children. Again, it's a theological matter. We operate under an infantile illusion that the religions are in competition with each other, and we battle our anxious beliefs with literal weapons. We profess religions that are ninety percent ideology, full of ego, and, in the face of this pseudo religion, create a secularistic society, which by definition is incapable of genuine community.
God is not responsible for the suffering; we are. Compared to our learning in almost all other areas, our notions of religion are childish. Religion is not a club of like-minded pals. It is a way of being that perceives the profound mystery of life, with all its paradoxes and contradictions, and makes an effort to transcend the individual person, discovering ultimately that God is love, what Christians call agape -- the kind of love manifested in community.
