Most
of us make a prayer, even unconsciously, that our own deaths will be peaceful,
and that we will somehow be in control as much as we can, until the very end. The
news, therefore, of the thousands and thousands who suffered death in terror in
Haiti, young and old, children and adults, crushed and entombed, to undergo a
death that in many cases must have been horrifyingly prolonged, fills us with
dread. We have read how so many of those who might have been able to help -
religious brothers and sisters, priests, nurses and doctors, government
officials, police, and so on - were among the victims of those first terrifying
minutes in Haiti.
When
people are killed in a car accident, or die as victims of terrorists, or go
down with an overcrowded ferry, then the rational part of us knows that we
cannot blame God for that. Nor was it God who herded millions of Jews into gas
chambers; it was human beings acting deliberately. We cannot blame God for
human action that is purposefully malicious, opting to be so, as when one
person deliberately murders another. But when the obviously innocent, be they
children or people who work for others, are killed so massively and so
dreadfully, it does raise for us the issue of the problem of evil and a loving
Father.
It
has been rightly said, I believe, that the problem of evil, the suffering of
the innocent, as in earthquake, where no human being initiated the action, is
as great a challenge to the faith of the believer as is the problem of good,
the heroism and sacrifice of people on behalf of each other, for the non-faith
of the unbeliever. We should not pretend not to be disturbed in our faith by
events such as the earthquake in Haiti. At times the hand of God is very hard
to see. But, if it is any consolation, we can in our temptation to doubt be
close to Jesus who was reduced to crying out in agony, ‘My God, My God, why
have you abandoned me?'
Yet
we know from the story of Jesus that the Father did not abandon him, that he
went through that gate into the fullness of the life of the resurrection. We
know the promise of Jesus that he came to bring us life, and to give it to the
full. We know that every hair of our head is counted, and that we are far more
precious in the eyes of God than any sparrow or flower of the field. For some
disciples at the time, the death of Jesus in the horror of the crucifixion was
the end of that movement, the end of that so-called prophet. But it was not the
end of the story. There was no completeness until the resurrection, which was
the final truth. That is the sort of outlook of faith that any of us must try
to bring to the problem of the suffering of the innocent.
But
there is also a very practical area for response. We know that the love of God
expresses itself through the compassion of His creatures, those working for the
sake of the afflicted. We also know that it was not God who built a city on a
fault-line, or who ignored building codes for safe construction, or who
weakened the concrete mix for the sake of profit, but we do know that all this
adds up to the fact that poverty amplifies the suffering. So many perished in
Samoa and other islands affected by the tsunami, as they also did in Haiti,
because they lived in shanty towns, buildings not able to withstand any force
at all. We know the country was too poor to enforce stricter building codes, codes
which would have strengthened the buildings and prevented the general collapse.
We
know that there would not be that same devastation in our own cities in
Australia, because we implement safety precautions in our building, because we
can afford to do so. We know that, unlike ourselves, Haiti could not afford to
have the range of medical equipment that we take for granted, and hence many
wounded and injured died who would not have died if the event had taken place
in our country.
Our
practical response should be to resolve ourselves to work harder for the
dissipation of poverty in those poorest of countries. In the last chapter of St
Matthew's Gospel, we are judged by that, how we gave water to the thirsty,
clothing to the naked, food to the hungry and so on. As we pray for the victims
of the earthquake of Haiti, including their Archbishop and very many
seminarians, priests and sisters who died with the rest of the people, that the
joy of the resurrection now be theirs, so may we also ask that our own faith be
refined as we pray over these events, that we do not waver in our sense of the
love of God for us, and that we might do something about those parts of the
world where poverty magnifies the impact of disaster.
By Bishop Greg O'Kelly SJ, Diocese of
Port Pirie.
Jesuit Mission Haiti Appeal.
Image: Wikipedia Commons.