This Vale of Tears…

            So the Salve Regina describes this world of ours as it awaits the restoration of all things.  Meanwhile there are the seemingly inscrutable tragedies that occur in our world, like the recent events down on the Gulf coast and in the city of New Orleans.  It all reminded me of what I read recently, with near incredulity, from a statement made by the Archbishop of Canterbury the day after the tsunami hit southeast Asia:  that it was catastrophes like that that made him doubt the existence of God.  That a Christian, especially a member of the clergy, should openly express such a doubt is regrettable; better if he had privately agonized over this in prayer.  And in the light of the tragedies that come to our world, there is room for agony on the part of those who do sorrow over the sufferings of others!

            But doubt the existence of God?  Surely we must remind ourselves that the tsunami and hurricane Katrina, though heartbreakingly tragic, are no real surprises in a world oft afflicted with such events.  History books are full of storms, earthquakes, plagues, famines and the like.  Again, not to make light of such horrors, but to put them in perspective.  One means of helping us do this is to remind ourselves that, at least in more recent times, the greatest horrors that have seen the loss of so much human life have not been the result of natural disasters so much as human violence:  the millions dead in that meaningless struggle called World War I, which set the stage for over 50 million killed in World War II; millions gassed by the Nazis; millions “purged” by Stalin; the fire-bombing of German cities in WWII, atomic bombs deliberately dropped on Japanese civilians (many of them Catholics), passenger jetliners used as missiles to topple skyscrapers .  The list goes on and on.  But it is only by recourse, ultimately, to God that these evils – moral evils – can be denounced for what they are. 

            All these human-engineered atrocities remind us that this world is under a shadow that points back to that first human tragedy in the Garden of Eden.  Man not only wrecked his relationship with God and with neighbor, but also with creation itself:  as God pronounced judgment upon Adam after his rebellion – “…cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.  In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:17ff).  St. Paul, in his letter to the Christians in Rome (who were to know much suffering in persecution), carries on the same theme: 

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.  For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.  We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.  For in this hope we were saved.  Now hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what he sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (8:18-25).           

            Thus is the first glimmer of the Christian explanation for the physical evils that torment our world.  But I do not offer it to those who suffer through what has happened recently in the wake of Katrina; that would be almost pitiless.  For them we offer our prayers and all the other help we can render them.  I offer it, rather, to those not directly affected by this disaster but who are perhaps driven to question God in the midst of our pilgrimage in this “vale of tears.”  Such tragedies come, but their happening should not lead to doubt of God’s existence and benevolence, but rather to the recognition of the awful inadequacy of humanity left to itself, to the reality of the vanity of ever trying to make this fallen world our permanent home.   

            David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, who offers in his books so many answers to theological difficulties, perhaps put it best when he wrote of the tsunami that killed so many: 

When confronted by the sheer savage immensity of worldly suffering--when we see the entire littoral rim of the Indian Ocean strewn with tens of thousands of corpses, a third of them children's--no Christian is licensed to utter odious banalities about God's inscrutable counsels or blasphemous suggestions that all this mysteriously serves God's good ends. We are permitted only to hate death and waste and the imbecile forces of chance that shatter living souls, to believe that creation is in agony in its bonds, to see this world as divided between two kingdoms--knowing all the while that it is only charity that can sustain us against "fate," and that must do so until the end of days.