Does God hate [fill in the blank]? (or is he at least angry with them?)

To begin with, I hope you will forgive me for taking a page from another blogger's book. Let's pray for:

• Florida as the hurricane approaches;
• the Russians involved in the recent terrorist attacks;
• the citizens of Iraq.

On to our main topic! I find it curious that some Christians pounce on the notion that God is angry with so-and-so for such-and-such a reason, and this explains the reason they are suffering. Yet these very same people become very, very quiet when many of the same things happen to them, and describe the tragedy in entirely different words.

For example: some time ago, Pat Robertson suggested that Orlando's gay pride parade could very well bring a major hurricane their way. Well and good — but the first hurricane of that year struck Virginia Beach directly. Virginia Beach is the headquarters of Robertson's religious corporation. I should note that, in the past, Robertson has boasted that his prayer army directed hurricanes away from Virginia.

Using Robertson's previous logic, then, you might conclude that God was gunning for Virginia Beach. Perhaps there some extraordinary sinfulness was going on near CBN that merited the hurricane that Robertson had predicted for Florida? I don't know, but I didn't hear any breastbeating coming from Roberston that perhaps some sin of his had attracted the hurricane his way.

Should I have? I don't think so. I don't think that a horrible tragedy proves that God is angry with the particular people who suffer the tragedy. It baffles me that, two thousand years after Jesus explained why a man was born blind and refuted the common understanding of why some Galileans had perished, and why some citizens of Jerusalem had perished, Christians continue to explain away every tragedy and all suffering as punishment for someone else's particular sins — almost never our own.

On the other hand, I don't think God is indifferent either, nor is he asleep at the wheel. The question as to whether God cares that people are suffering, and why he allows their suffering (causes it, if you prefer) does strike me as an important question that religious people need to grapple with. If for no other reason, we need to face this question because of the immense spiritual poverty that has devastated Western Christianity: most Western Christians find no meaning in sacrifice, let alone suffering. Just look at our paucity of vocations, and the large numbers who fling themselves headlong into an embrace with euthanasia.

I do think the Italian author Eugenio Corti is dead-on in his books I più non ritornano and Il cavallo rosso (Few Returned and The Red Horse). In both texts he insists on the following idea, taken from the former (full quote at the end of the post):

Even so, I felt very strongly that [our leaders] were nothing more than disgraceful people, simple instruments in the hands of Providence. ...We all felt it impossible that such enormous events as those we witnessed should depend on the will of a few small men.

They were the castigations of all Humanity.

Only God can castigate humanity.

This is the correct understanding of war.

[I]t is necessary that men in their entirety do not make war inevitable by accumulating fault upon fault before God. For at some point, these faults will become an avalanche that moves, and collides, and sweeps away.

Corti wrote these words more than sixty years ago, after experiencing the murderous retreat of the Italian army from Russia.

To sharpen the distinction I'm trying in clumsy fashion to make: tragedy is God's castigation for collective sin, as opposed to individual groups of people for personal sin. Tragedy should bring us to a sense of repentance, not to a sense of judgment.

(I do not mean to deny the traditional belief that we merit punishment for our personal sins.)

Very well, but the image of sinners in the hands of an angry God does not typically attract the non-believer. Can we view tragedy in another sense, phrase it another way?

To start with, the eyes of faith do not see tragedy as final. The children and adults who died in Russia, are not eternally lost; their souls are in the hands of God.

However, I want to return to Corti's passage. It corresponds well to Jesus' admonition in the Gospel of Luke, I'll look at the story in the Gospel of John. Jesus has the following interchange with his disciples:

His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him. We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world." (NAB)

It is so that the works of God might be made visible through him. ...While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.

So I wonder if maybe the correct way to view tragedy isn't the following: God allows tragedy to bring us closer together, to make saints of us. God remarked after creating Adam, It is not good for the man to be alone. God made us to need each other, not only as man and woman, but as brother and sister.

If Christ's life is meant to show us how God meant for us to live, then the onset of tragedy ought not to be an occasion to condemn one another, not even to blame people who really are sinners for their sins. Tragedy is the opportunity to shine God's light into the world. I, as a Chrsitian, need to shine Christ's light into the world.

Full text of the quote from Corti's book:

The German vehicles, emitting dense vapor, howled their way up the ascent with black wheels amid the snow.

The mules and the horses struggled in their effort; on each of their sleds, the souls of two or three wounded literally hung, with mortal anxiety, on their efforts.

And the wind would not stop, and it diligently explored the entire surface of our bodies, untiring in its effort to strip our lives from us.

What greater happiness would there have been, than to be able to rest on a cabin floor! Not heated, no, I didn't imagine much, only walls that might at least give me refuge from the wind...

I came to think of our leaders who had declared war: at this moment they were in Rome, warm in their habitual luxury; perhaps they were sleeping in soft beds.

And they had sent soldiers into this climate, with these shoes, equipped in this manner! Pigs! Sons of dogs!

Even so, I felt very strongly that they were nothing more than disgraceful people, simple instruments in the hands of Providence.

All of us realized this, each of us more or less clearly, according to his own intuitive ability. (Thus we spoke much less rarely of our leaders than when things went well; either we accused them, or we inveighed against them.)

We all felt it impossible that such enormous events as those we witnessed should depend on the will of a few small men.

They were the castigations of all Humanity.

Only God can castigate humanity.

This is the correct understanding of war.

Even if we were to succeed in saving ourselves, and if we had found some way to explain to others what is war, especially to those responsible, there would nevertheless be wars in the future, against every human logic.

In any case, even in the past, man would never have come to desire war, if it were possible not to desire it. And so, to avoid the growth of this desire, it is necessary that men in their entirety do not make war inevitable by accumulating fault upon fault before God. For at some point, these faults will become an avalanche that moves, and collides, and sweeps away.