I can't see through the dust...

For the last week, I have felt burdened by a heavy heart. I have felt fear--about nothing in particular--but fear nonetheless. Spending some time thinking about, I can point to the source the of these feelings. On Tuesday of last week, an earthquake killed thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people and left so many more homeless. I feel heavy-hearted as I pray for the people of Haiti, but the fear....that's because of what Haiti has done to me.

The shaking, shattering, and crumbling of structures in Haiti has resonated and shaken the part of my heart where faith lies. Tragedies have this affect on me, always have. For some reason, the "smaller" tragedies of life, those things that affect only a few people, are incidences of suffering that I can somehow get past and justify because its a fact of life. I don't condone this justification, but that's not the focus of reflection here. My focus here, if only because of how profoundly it has affected me, is how sheerly massive the crisis in Haiti is. It's so big that it doesn't have edges, thus I can't fit it into my faith. I haven't been able to really write any of this down until something I already knew was affirmed for me yesterday by Rev. Dr. Doug Dickens in a pastoral care seminar. While speaking about the importance of lament, Doug said, "We have been taught for far too long that we have to keep our faith clean." So, this isn't clean, I'm not able to get my mind or my heart around it, but I have to start somewhere.

On Thursday of last week, I had my assigned chapel duties and as the hour for chapel approached, I still could not gather words for a sermon or meditation or reflection of any sort. I had this nice sermon about Samuel hearing God's voice in the temple written, but it did not take me long to realize that needed to be thrown out. I kept thinking of a lecture in Tom Long's preaching course in which he said simply, "If you have a worship service right after a tragedy or crisis and you don't preach about it, then you have done a great disservice to the body of Christ." But as I tried to gather my thoughts, I asked the question, "Where is God in all this?" My answer was, I have no idea. And if I had no idea, what was I then to say. So when I stood up in front of the chapel that morning, I talked about the South African concept of ubuntu, meaning that a person is a person through other persons. I talked about how I don't know why natural disasters come and destroy lives and structures and how I don't know why cancer strikes and hearts fail. I talked about how what I do know is that communities come together and reach out and identify. I guess what I was getting at was something like what JFK meant in West Berlin when he uttered "Ich bin ein Berliner." I sought to highlight the interconnectedness of humanity. But this wasn't enough for me because it didn't answer the question of where God was last Tuesday, and I said that in the chapel to the few who'd come for worship. (I realize I speak here in this entry just following an entry in which I wrote a sermon that spoke to the importance of community after natural disasters. It's harder when you're going through it.)

After chapel on Thursday, one of my fellow chaplains called me into his office to talk to me about what I'd said in chapel. The conversation went something like this:
Him: I understand you when you say you don't know why these things happen, but really, where do you see God in all this?
Me: I really don't know.
Him: By your own admission, you said you see God in the world community that is coming together to help out. Do you think that God caused the earthquake so we could then see him in the community?
Me: I think the Earth's crust shifted and that caused the quakes.
Him: But isn't the Earth's crust part of God's creation?
Me: Yes, but I'm not comfortable with that.

The conversation went on for a while more but the long and short of it was that I told my colleague that I am uncomfortable with a God who needs to bring about destruction to be seen. Because just the opposite has really happened for me. A lyric keeps coming to mind (as they so often do when I'm working through stuff. It is my great sadness that music stirs so much in me but I have no discernible musical ability). "Who do you believe when you can't get through smoke..." Seeing through the smoke and dust and rubble is what I'm trying to do. This reflection in some ways feels like a letdown for myself because I don't have an answer. I haven't come to some great conclusion. I haven't heard any responses that made me feel better. Probably because there aren't any.

But what I have come to is that I haven't changed my mind in seeing God in the aftermath. I don't know what causes brokenness, but I know what God does with brokenness. God takes the broken body, God's own broken body in Christ, and makes that body for us a symbol of redemption and resurrection. An earthquake broke us and through our brokenness great things will happen. We are all the body of Christ, the broken body of Christ, and God specializes in using the broken and doing a new thing.

I pray for Haiti, I pray for Haiti's people, and I pray for all the lives affected beyond those in Port-au-Prince. I pray to God who makes all things new, even though I don't understand how it works.