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Rector's Blog
Thursday, December 30, 2004
The Sumatra Tsunami of 2004 calls to mind the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755. The similarities between the catastrophes are striking.
Both occurred on a Christian holiday. The Lisbon Earthquake struck at about 9:30 a.m. on All Saint's Day, November 1. The Sumatra Tsunami at about 10:00 a.m. on the day after Christmas.
Like the earthquake that spawned the tsunami, experts estimate the Lisbon earthquake would have registered about 9.0 on the Richter scale. The Lisbon Earthquake was centered in the Atlantic Ocean, about 120 miles West/Southwest of Cape St. Vincent and spawned a tsunami that contributed to the deaths of 70,000 people in Lisbon (a port city) alone, not counting other coastal communities of Portugal.
The Lisbon Earthquake took place at a time in European political and economic history when the nation-state was being refined and capitalism was being born in the midst of an emerging Industrial Revolution that would transform the word. This period of change found expression in the "philosophes" of the Enlightenment who were challenging traditional Christian assumptions about the nature of reality. The disaster resulted in a discussion and debate carried on through books, letters, essays, poetry and theater about the nature of God.
In 1755 the Lisbon Earthquake inspired Voltaire's cynical comedy Candide, that gave the old argument of the problem of evil a permanent place in the literature of the Western world. But before Candide, Voltaire wrote a poem called simply, "Poem of the Lisbon Earthquake." It included this challenge to faith:
"But how conceive a God supremely good
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?"
Voltaire's dark cynicism inspired a response from another master of the Enlightenment, Jean Rousseau. The year before the Lisbon disaster Rousseau had returned to the city of his birth in Geneva, Switzerland and sought admission to the Reformed Church where he had been baptized.
Rousseau came after Voltaire like a pit bull in silk, gracious but going for the jugular nevertheless.
"Now what does your poem tell me?" Rousseau writes. "'Suffer forever, unfortunates. If a God created you, He is doubtlessly all-powerful and could have prevented all your woes. Never hope that your woes will end, for you exist for no reason, if it is not to suffer and die.'"
He goes on to review other thinkers who have contributed to the general discussion related to how one understands the nature of God in the midst of human suffering. Then he writes,
"If I gather all these questions together under their common principle, it seems to me that they all relate to that of the existence of God. If God exists, He is perfect; if He is perfect, He is wise, powerful and just; if He is wise and powerful, all is well; if He is just and powerful, my soul is immortal, if my soul is immortal, thirty years of life are nothing to me. . . . If you grant me the first, then never can the rest be shaken."
He concludes with a final observation about the very human context in which the two thinkers engage problem of human suffering.
"I cannot prevent myself, Monsieur, from noting a strange contrast between you and me as regards the subject of this letter. Satiated with glory. . .you live free in the midst of affluence. Certain of your immortality, you peacefully philosophize on the nature of the soul and, if your body or heart suffer, you have Tronchin as doctor and friend. You however find only evil on earth. And I, an obscure, poor and lonely man, tormented with an incurable illness -- I contemplate with pleasure my seclusion and find that all is well. What is the source of this apparent contradiction? You explained it yourself: you enjoy, but I hope -- and hope beautifies everything."
Like the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 the Sumatra Tsunami of 2004 has taken place during a period of global change. Political and economic change is reshaping the human experience once again and in ways that is forcing people to explore the nature of reality and the reality of God.
Voices will rise up and to give Voltaire's view of human despair in face of an empty universe yet another run. Likewise, faith will endure. And in the midst of it all, acknowledged or not, God's grace will continue to move among us to give hope and succor to the survivors among us all.
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Friday, December 24, 2004
I came accross an interesting article in the New York Times this morning. The International Bible Society is sponsoring a campaign to place New Testaments in daily newspapers. The Newspapers treat it as advertising and charge the appropriate fee.
This resulted in a debate about whether a newspaper, distributing a New Testament, amounts to an endorsement of a particular religion. Some have raised a first amendment concern and referenced the "separation of church and state" clause, forgetting, perhaps, that a newspaper is not an instrument of the state. The first amendment also includes something about the freedom of speach.
Here again is yet another misunderstanding of the value of church and state separation. Individuals of faith who constitute the church need protection from the state. The public does not need protection from ideas, stories and truth claims. Quite the opposite. The public needs exposure to a wide variety of ideas, stories and truth claims in order to mature into a more just society.
Happily, clear thinking people made their voice heard in this debate. Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington research organization affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism weighed in on the discussion.
"I think there is a free speech issue here," Mr. Rosenstiel said. "I think this is one of the things about newspapers: they deliver you everything. If a newspaper is open to all, I don't understand the issue here. Are we frightened of having this (the New Testament) in our house? Should people of one religion not read the scriptures of another? We can't neuter our society."
Of greater interest than first ammendment interpreation is the idea that the New Testment constitutes a religion. The New Testament is a collection of ancient documents, letters mostly, with a strange kind of biography included (Gospels). Instead of reading these texts, people turn them into a symbol representing a variety of movements, traditions and institutions that may or may not reflect the perspectives, values, concerns and intentions expressed in the text themselves.
Is Das Capital, by Karl Marx a religous text? Or, Beyond God and Evil, by Neitzsche? Or how about Civilization and Its Discontents, by Freud. Each of these launched movements that have contributed to the identity of the West in the 20th century and have provided the momentum that is shaping the 21st. When does a text become religous, or a symbol of religion?
Wouldn't it be great to wake up one morning and find in your driveway with your newspaper a representative passage from the New Testament with representative passages from Marx, Neitzsche, and Freud? What a great read that would be.
Personally, I find in the New Testament (informed by the Old Testament of course) a much more compelling presentation of the nature of human experience than anything else I have ever read, including Marx, Neitzsche, and Freud. I keep going back to it again and again becaus after 30 years of reading I have yet to exhaust its richness.
I would cherish the opportunity to find representative passages from all these texts wrapped together with my morning newspaper. Unfortunatley, unlike the International Bible Society, disciples of Marx, Neitzsche and Freud are not motivated to put up the money to pay for their distibution.
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Thursday, December 23, 2004
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and all day today the Altar Guild and their minions have been decorating the church. Greens go up on the wall. The smell of pine perfumes the air. Wreaths hang merrily from nails. And the candles. This year the Altar Guild Liturgy Design mavens have created torches (candles on stilts?) to light our aisle, and perhaps -- if the metaphor holds and its not too sentimental and predictable -- to light our way. I deeply appreciate the effort. I watch all the activity and smile. All the effort, the smells, the flickering light and the shifting shadows frame a reality no one really understands. We create a space so that late on Christmas Eve we can sit together and realize, none of us, not one of us, has a clue as to what is really going on. My wife thinks when it comes to Christmas I am just this side of Ebenezer Scrooge. But she mistakes my pensiveness for a spirit that lacks the proper holiday cheer. My mother gave me the word "pensive" in a Christmas season a long time ago. She was the first to recognize and to accurately interpret my experience to myself. "The word means," she said, "thoughtfully quiet." For a reason I do not understand Christmas always puts me in a mood. I am tempted to call it a mood for deep reflection, but the truth is there is nothing deep about it. The problem is I don't have the mental resources to penetrate the thought I want to think. An idea, is it an idea? Or a concept. Is concept right? Maybe it's a reality? Something envelops me like a fog. It lacks form. It lacks substance. It is dark without the quality of gloom. It is light without the benefit of clarity. Perhaps this is what the tradition means by the mystery of the incarnation. God (whatever that means) became flesh (whatever that means) and dwells among us (whatever that means). I went to school for seven years to learn about this. I have a job where some people (mistakenly) believe I am supposed to explain all this. And I live in middle of Silicon Valley where people get paid to make the damn thing work, and I can't even make the damn thing make sense. And so on Christmas Eve I walk into the darkness of God's glorious light and brood. Happily I am not the first guy on the planet to stand speechless before the deepest mystery of the cosmos. I think this is what the Christmas liturgy is really all about. We sing songs we have sung all our lives to give expression to a truth we can never know. It is a truth we cannot know, but it is a truth that nevertheless carries us through the simple and the complex and intractable challenges of each and every day.
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Archive:
12/01/2004 - 12/31/2004
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