Tsunami - Where was God? - Michael Graeme

Tsunami - Where was God?

Michael Graeme

The Tsunami that occurred in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004 claimed around 280,000 lives and was, to use the much quoted cliché of the time, a natural disaster of Biblical proportions. Following it's aftermath, and the overwhelming global response to help the millions of survivors, questions were raised regarding the validity of conventional religious views concerning a benign and protecting God.

From my own perspective, tucked away safe in my little house in rural England, I could relate to this terrible event in only a very simple and perhaps totally inadequate way: sadness for the lost, compassion for the injured and the homeless and a sense of awe at the destructive power of nature. The T.V. images I saw of towns flattened by the ocean left me speechless and I could compare them only to those disturbing newsreels of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, after the atomic bombs were dropped in 1945.

The response of the world to these events was a gargantuan effort to provide relief and rescue. Nations dispatched their warships, their helicopters and their giant cargo planes, and ordinary people dug deeper than usual, handing over many hundreds of millions of pounds to the relief agencies. For me, it was the most uplifting evidence of collective human goodness I can remember. It stands as perhaps one of the few positive things to come out of the mud that spewed onto the shores of the Indian Ocean, a mud that turned so much that was rich and beautiful into something dark and barren and ugly.

Yet I noted with some amazement that even something on this scale was insufficient to provide the world's media with sufficient sensationalist material to feed their news bulletins for very long. By the turn of the new year, they seemed to have run out of angles on misery and began instead to chatter rather childishly around the fringes of the disaster, sniping at the UK government for not raising as much cash as ordinary people, sniping at certain leaders for not doing or saying the right things at the right time. And then, even though the media these days seems uniformly secular, they eventually got around to sniping at God.

What kind of God, they said, could allow such a terrible thing to happen?

Perhaps picking up on these stories, ordinary people did indeed ask themselves this very question and I recall vividly middle of the road Christians saying they were minded to abandon their faith altogether. How could they go on believing, they said, in a benign God who would let something so terrible happen? This was an important question that cut to the very heart of their beliefs, yet theologians were, I thought, rather unhelpful and remained conspicuously silent on the matter for a very long time. Indeed those who did appear in the media seemed to concentrate solely on organising prayers for the departed, but none offered any comfort or meaningful explanation for those who had begun to question their faith.

I did eventually hear one theologian holding to the idea of a benign interventionist God while at the same time describing the earth as being rather a dangerous place, a world still struggling to be born, going through its own acts of violent creation, as if it could not help itself occasionally spilling the bath water. Personally, I did not find this argument very convincing as it seemed to be describing God as an incompetant parent unable to cope with a petulant child.

I felt great sympathy for those whose faith was understandably challenged, but for myself, perhaps strangely for a former agnostic, I could not blame God, indeed I found myself coming down firmly on God's side. I wanted to offer comforting explanations to those questioning their faith but found to my shame I was unable to do so. On reflection I realised the reason I had failed was that it was impossible to provide any reasonable answers while remaining within the framework of conventional, and in my case, Christian belief. There was no answer, no comfort to be given in the language of a people who felt that their God had let them down.

Now it has to be said, from the layman's point of view, that in terms of looking after mankind, the God I was introduced to as a child, does not have a very good record at all. Indeed nowadays it seems that even in the passage of a single year, there are so many terrible events and needless loss of life, that I wonder how anyone can remain faithful to the idea of a guardian deity - a benign and watchful creator. If we require further proof then we need only remember the dead of two world wars, the horror of the trenches and the calculated evil of the holocaust.

In his novel, Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks describes the particularly moving scene of a clergyman throwing away his cross upon witnessing the mechanical slaughter of young English boys, as they were deliberately marched into a hail of machine gun fire, their precious lives knowingly wasted. This sums up perhaps the feelings of many when they sit down to think about the worst moments in human history and try to see it from the spiritual perspective. To be sure, the evidence suggests that, if God there be, we've got the wrong idea about him altogether. Either God does not exist, or he is unable or unwilling to intervene on our behalf. (Feminists please forgive the masculine gender here, but I was unable to descrivbe God as an "it")

Twenty years ago I would have found the religious dimension of this disaster much easier to deal with by simply dismissing talk of God in the first place. But having come back to a somewhat muddle headed sense of a higher purpose in recent times, this terrible event has caused me to look very hard at what it is I have begun to believe and to try to define it in sharper terms, to see if my philosophy can pass the tests and the paradoxes raised by this and other disasters.

One of the most striking images I remember, following the aftermath of the wave was a gathering of Buddhist faithful, on a hillside. They were offering prayers, lighting candles and sending up hundreds of wonderful illuminated paper balloons into an evening sky. After scenes of such unimaginable destruction, I found this very moving. I do not know much about the in's and out's of Buddhist ritual but to my eyes those long paper balloons seemed to float up like spirits escaping the shackles and the suffering of the earth - symbolic representations of the souls of those who had perished. There had been great suffering, but in death, there was peace.

Amid all our Western Christian soul searching, we perhaps forget that many of the people who bore the brunt of this disaster are Buddhist, and who perhaps through the nature of their beliefs are more able to cope, spiritually, with what has happened than we are. At the heart of Buddhism is an acceptance of the suffering of the world, and a belief that escape is possible only by the negation of all desire, and, ultimately, through death. I am not a Buddhist, but find I have great sympathy with this view. It seems eminently pragmatic and does not require awkward questions to be asked of a guardian deity every time something bad happens.

In 1878, in London, on the river Thames, there was a collision between a pleasure steamer, the Princess Alice, and a coal-barge. The pleasure steamer was sliced in two and the passengers found themselves suddenly spilled into the waters of the great river, which at that moment, due to an unfortunate coincidence, were running thick with sewerage. 600 people died the most horrible death, drowing, to put it politely, in rancid effluent.

This incident made a big impression on the imagination of a sensitive young writer called Richard Jeffries, then struggling to make his living as a journalist and author in Victorian London. Unfortunately for his career, Jeffries hated London with a passion. Born near Swindon, in Wiltshire, he was a countryman at heart with a deft touch and a hint of the spiritual in his depictions of bucolic life. However, his views on religion were somewhat unconventional and in one of his books: "The Story of my Heart" he mentions the incident of the Princess Alice as a particularly chilling illustration of the absurdity of belief in a benign deity.

The book was not well received at the time, but reading it now it's hard to see Jeffries as anything other than a man who was simply ahead of his time - a visionary trapped in the straitjacket of conservative Victorian values.

Jeffries was a nature-mystic, a much confused term, but one instinctively understood by those still sensitive to the pulse of the natural world. His success was his ability to articulate effortlessly what many instinctively felt. He was not exactly an atheist and believed passionately in the divine nature of the human soul. Indeed for Jeffries, awareness of the soul was the only measure of the validity and the quality of our individual lives. Without awareness of soul, he argued, we are merely biological machines toiling pointlessly. Unless we lead a life in complete awareness of our soul, then it is a life not lived in any truly meaningful sense.

Jeffries' key observation was that this "soul-life" was more easily realised in places that embraced the natural world, and in the mysterious, highly subjective concept of beauty. However, he dismissed the idea of a deity altogether and said this was too simplistic a view, that in order to explain everything he had felt, there had to be something infinitely higher than "mere deity".

Like Jeffries I believe I have felt the presence of what I believe to be my own soul, all be it on rare occasions, when I am in wild places that are familiar and loved, and when I sense a peculiar affinity with all that is around me. This does not happen very often, and perhaps just as often the natural world looks just as tired and cold and jaded to me as anywhere else, but this is more to do with the eye of the beholder - for an eye fed on ugliness can sometimes transfer its weariness to other things. We become hardened to nature and unable to feel our profound connection to it. This is especially the effect of urban living, a thing Jeffries tried to explain through his unflattering depictions of Victorian London. Such a place has no soul, or rather it contains little that reflects the soul of the individual, little to confirm the divinity and the worth of our own inner selves - a view that was as incomprehensible to city dwellers then, as no doubt it remains today.

Jeffries' beliefs were home-grown, born out of a country upbringing and an uncommonly sensitive eye. Though well educated he had no intimate knowledge of eastern religions such as Buddhism or Taoism which offer a different view of the idea of God. Had he done so, I think he would have found much to support his own view of things, and perhaps he would not have felt so terribly alone.

What this is all leading up to is the central plank of what appears to be my philosophy: there is no benign deity. The evidence is there for anyone with eyes to see. What we do have, though, I believe, is a process of which we are a part, a process that brings us into being, and one that also numbers our days. The same process also crushes the tectonic plates and throws up great mountains of water. It's called creation and it's not something that happened a long time ago. It is a process of constant renewal and change. It is neither benign nor malevolent,... it simply "is".

I believe Jeffries was right: there is something infinitely higher than the Victorian, conservative view of "deity", which nowadays strikes me as so naive I wonder how anyone but a child can be accepting of it. In fact, what we have, what we should be in awe of, is the process of creation itself. Science can tell us a lot about this process. It can predict it, explain it, and even modify it - for at least some aspects of creation can be boiled down to a set of rules that are observable and knowable. There is no place in such a system for a deity tweaking the controls. E = mc2. Fact. The last thing we want is an interventionist deity making E = mc3 every now and then.

This sounds like the typical agnostic or atheist view of things, but it isn't. A universe without purpose, without meaning is a chilling prospect and an image I no longer hold with, not least because it denies an essential part of ourselves, it denies the reality of Jeffries' "soul-life" and renders our existence, our sentience as an entirely meaningless anomaly in an otherwise unconscious and unfeeling universe.

What I hold to these days is not a picture of a knowable God, nor a benign, nor even a vengeful deity, but instead a picture of an astonishingly complex world, one that includes a sense of individual purpose and meaning, contained within the boundaries of a process that is both physical and metaphysical, the details of which remain entirely beyond our comprehension.

It sounds like a strange philosophy, to believe in something you cannot describe and yet remain perfectly content in its mystery. To be sure, I cannot begin to describe the nature of this process and I've come to believe that it is useless or even counter productive even to speculate upon it, other than to say it runs far deeper than the physical structure of the world, that the worlds we can explore in our minds and in our deeper consciousness, our personal myths if you like, far from being fanciful, are as important as the world we can explore with our physical senses.

For the term "God" to survive, and to continue having any relevance in my personal lexicon, then it has to transcend the traditional definition of mere deity and embrace the mystery of the whole process of creation and our part in it, both physical and spiritual. If you like, for me God could no longer be seen as simply controlling the process: God was higher than deity. God was the process. God was everything, and everywhere,...

This might seem rather insulting to the conservative view, but for me it was the key to overcoming the central paradox of a benign deity presiding over a world so full of suffering. Also, for me, God becomes at last, truly personal - not in the sense of being knowable, but in the sense of a presence that can be felt and sometimes revealed through the inner workings of the world, because I am a part of those workings. In my way of understanding things God shines through me and through each and every one of us, therefore nothing is ever really lost, like energy, it can be neither created nor destroyed but merely changed from one form into another, redistributed and transposed into other manifest forms of the greater process.

So, as I see it, God was swept away in the terrible Tsunami of 2004 and gave two hundred and eighty thousand cries of suffering. He was cut to pieces by machine gun fire at Ypres and Flanders, and he fell on the beaches of Normandy. He also dies a thousand times each day, and each day is reborn, blinking, wide eyed and suckling at his mother's breast. He speculates upon the nature of existence by writing words like these, and then through other eyes he nods agreement, or tut-tuts and dismisses them as rubbish.

I was filled with awe at the self control of those relief workers who gazed upon beaches strewn with bodies, at those who waited on each tide to yield up its grim harvest so the dead could be counted and cleared away. I cannot imagine what thoughts went through their minds, nor how they could begin to summon the will to bend their backs to that awful task. All my life I have only seen one corpse with my own eyes, the victim of a motorway crash, and then in only the briefest of moments as I passed on my way. But what struck me was that there was nothing human in what I glimpsed. The light had gone out of it. So too the drowned and the lost of the Tsunami - they were no longer human beings, those sad remains,... not loved ones, not husbands and wives and children, but discarded vessels, void of that essential spark, that light... that soul.

Of course, for us to retain any sort of faith in the meaning of existence, it is necessary to believe that the light of our loved ones, or of ourselves is not lost, that the soul is eternal. If we are to absorb the pain of the Tsunami of 2004, or as Victorian London did, the sinking of the Princess Alice in 1878, and retain faith in a higher purpose, then the best we can do is to hang it on the eternal nature of the soul, that in some sense and in some form that we might never comprehend, the vital essence of our humanity will survive our otherwise frail biology.

Though we might prize our life more than anything else it is a simple truth that from the cosmic perspective any individual manifestation of consciousness is of only passing importance. Imagine for a moment the nameless dead of all the ages, each life of immeasurable value to its owner, but now gone and forgotten - legions of life, veritable mountains of self worth, all swept away by time. Then we begin to see that Death deals an even hand, claiming those we hate and those we love in equal measure, those we might feel are deserving of an untimely end, and those whose loss leaves us reeling with shock. For example, there is nothing more devastating than the death of a child. It seems an insult to all that is sweet and innocent in our hearts, and yet children die in their thousands every day. How can we reconcile that without trusting that in a metaphysical sense, what is valuable in them, or in any of us will survive. In this same way we try to render death as an irrelevance, and trust what has survived death from our earliest of days will be continually renewed and returned to us, for as long as mankind walks the earth.

Of course none of this is of any comfort to those mourning the loss of loved ones. Indeed, to say that death is amoral, impartial in its choices and entirely irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, might seem to explain very little. And to say it is the fate of the lost to be taken from us, as it is our fate to bear their loss, might not warm anyone to the idea of fate as the tool of an incomprehensible cosmic process. But it is the only thing that has come to make any sense to me, avoiding as it does the paradoxes inherent in a system that relies upon a presiding and infinitely compassionate deity for its foundations.

Of course such a personal philosophy as this might simply be the result of the onset of middle age and a man's natural fear of his own death. Perhaps I have to create a scenario in which my own inconsequential life might not appear to have been for nothing, and that something else will follow, something pleasant enough to render the inconvenience of death a price worth paying. In other words it could all simply be wishful thinking, a desire to come in from the cold of the grey, secular winter and gaze once more upon the warm and radiant coals as they glow richly in the comforting hearth of a kind of spirituality. But then it is part of the human condition that we must each of us make our peace with the world as best we can, and the way I see it these days I feel capable at least of accepting the world, both for its astonishing beauty, and also for its occasionally overwhelming horrors.

We cannot blame God for all the tragedies that have ever befallen mankind. Some things like wars might one day become entirely obsolete if we ever learn to collectively embrace the better sides of our natures, but other things are inescapable and will be carried through into the world regardless of their cost in terms of human life. At such times we can do no more than weep for those departed, and perhaps in the silence of the aftermath feel the presence of our own souls, a presence normally hidden from us by the noise of our lives. And in feeling that presence we can perhaps take some comfort in the sure and certain knowledge of the little piece of immortality we each carry, in these otherwise frail biological vehicles of flesh and blood and bone.

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