|
 wice
the usual congregation at church this Sunday. If I were more of
a churchgoer myself, I would be smug about this. As it is, I confess
to a teeny bit of smugness. Though not an active member of
my church, never having faced up to the hundreds of hours of time
and thousands of dollars of money per annum that would involve
if entered into wholeheartedly (and why bother to enter into it
any other way?) I attend Sunday communion about once a month, which
at least elevates me very slightly above the ranks of what the clergy
call "P.A.C.E. Christians" — folk who show up only
at Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Christmas, and Easter. You'd be surprised
at the things the clergy say behind our backs ... unless you've
read the novels and stories of J.
F. Powers, in which case you wouldn't be surprised at all.
Our minister
welcomed the unexpected half of his congregation in the spirit of
the Prodigal Son parable, and everyone was made to feel at home.
That's what a church is for. We prayed for the country, for the
rescue workers, for the bereaved, for the dead. We sang H. F. Lyte's
wonderful hymn "Praise My Soul the King of Heaven" to
the tune it should be sung to, Lauda Anima, and for once
I tried hard not to mind that the beautiful lines in the fourth
verse that I sang as a child:
Saints triumphant,
bow before Him,
Gathered in from every race,
have been replaced,
in the 1982 Episcopalian hymnal, by a weird combination of pagan
sky-worship and the General Theory of Relativity:
Sun and moon,
bow down before Him,
Dwellers all in time and space...
Poor benighted
old Henry Francis could hardly be expected to know that saints are
disgracefully elitist, that to feel triumphant about victory over
the differently religioned betrays a lack of sensitivity, and that
"race" is merely a social construct.
There is, of
course, nothing to be ashamed of in seeking solace at church in
such dark days, even if it was your first attendance since Easter.
It's human nature. Universal human nature: "When times are
calm you don't burn joss; when times are rough you hug Buddha's
foot," goes the Chinese saying. At least it gives you the opportunity
to think about how God factors into it all. It is of course a much-cherished
cliché of the irreligious that in a war, everyone claims
to have God on his side. Bob Dylan wrote a scathing song about that,
back in the days before he himself saw the light. Is God on our
side?
From Pat Robertson
and Jerry Falwell comes the answer: "Sort of." Pat and
Jerry think that the events of last week are a judgment on us for
our sinful ways, a call to repentance. But let me not put words
in their mouths. Jerry: "God Almighty is lifting his protection
from us ... We have imagined ourselves invulnerable and have been
consumed by the pursuit of ... health, wealth, material pleasures
and sexuality ... God continues to lift the curtain and allow the
enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve." Pat:
"We have insulted God at the highest level of our government.
Then, we say, 'Why does this happen?'"
Theologically
speaking, the position Pat and Jerry are promoting has a long and
respectable pedigree. They are, in fact, saying pretty much what
the Old Testament prophets said to the children of Israel. Here
is the fiercest of those prophets, Jeremiah:
Were they
ashamed when they had committed abomination? Nay, they were not
at all ashamed, neither could they blush: therefore shall they
fall among them that fall...
And fall Jerusalem
did, to the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, on March 16th of 597 B.C.
Her people were dragged off into captivity. Are we in a similar
case?
I can't say
I think so. The God I pray to is not like that. He is, in the words
of that hymn: "Slow to chide and swift to bless." I wouldn't
dismiss the idea quite as sneeringly as some have, though. For anyone
who believes in a managerial God — a God who takes an interest
in human beings and their affairs, and takes a hand in directing
them — the great problem to be faced is always the problem
of theodicy, of divine justice. If God cares about us, why does
he inflict unbearable suffering on us, or permit others to inflict
it? Why does he let evil exist? My own church will give you an answer
they have spent 400 years working out, a set of elegant but complicated
theological arguments. Most ordinary believers can't be bothered
with deep theology and just fall back on a sort of submissive fatalism:
"Thy will, not ours, be done." Pat and Jerry's alternative
answer is not much to the taste of the times we live in, nor to
my taste either, but I have to admit it's a bit more muscular than
the one we Episcopalians offer, and perfectly logical.
It depends,
of course, on a certain amount of group profiling. Who, exactly,
is being punished? Why, the whole nation. This talk of God "punishing"
us must surely be unacceptable, if not downright insulting, to the
grieving widow who says: "Why my husband? He was a good man,
a kind man. If God wants to punish the ungodly, why didn't the damn
hijackers crash their planes into Plato's Retreat, Madonna's apartment
on Fifth, or an abortion clinic?" To which Pat and Jerry's
answer (assuming they follow Jeremiah's lead) is: "Their turn
is coming." Here they lose me. I have not the slightest doubt
that thousands of those who died were much better people than I
am. So presumably my turn is coming, too. Are we all to be dragged
off into captivity in Babylon? Which would be to say, in present-day
Iraq? I should prefer to think — and as far as one can be objective
about it, it looks at this point to be statistically much more likely
— that the unfortunate, long-suffering people of Iraq are going
to get some visitations of their own quite soon, courtesy of the
United States armed forces.
My own belief,
for what it is worth, is that God is indeed on our side, notwithstanding
the fact that Osama bin Laden thinks the same thing on his own behalf,
and with far more passion that my lackluster observances show. If
God has any interest in human affairs at all, and I believe He does,
how can He not be on the side of liberty, justice, and equality?
His whole creation is there to be understood, and human reason —
which He also created — has shown itself capable, by tremendous
efforts and with many false leads, of understanding more and more
of it. But that only happens where free enquiry is possible, and
free enquiry is possible only in a nation that permits it, a nation
with liberty under the rule of law. What does a fundamentalist "Islamic
republic" exist for? For the endless repetition of truth revealed
once and for ever, and the obscurantist proscription of all further
enquiry into the nature of the world and humanity? Is that what
God wants? I can't believe it. I don't want humanity to stay stuck
in the seventh century, I don't believe God wants that, and I don't
believe any but a very small number of Muslims wants it either.
Still, you
never know. There have been quite long stretches of history, like
the Captivity of the Jews, when it must have seemed, to our feeble
understandings, as if God had deserted the human race altogether.
For all anyone can tell we might be heading into one of those stretches.
Of all the hundreds of pieces of commentary I have read this past
few days, the one that made the deepest impression was by the Dublin
writer Kevin Myers, who I have admired for years as one of the sanest
and most thoughtful commentators on the Northern Ireland problem.
Writing in the London Daily
Telegraph this Sunday, Myers argues that America cannot
do nothing, which of course is true; and that America cannot do
anything merely small or ineffectual, which is also true. However,
he says, it is impossible to think of anything big America
can do that will not be massively destabilizing to the world order.
Which, it seems to me, is also true.
"Last
Tuesday, the entire world crossed a terrible threshold. We departed
from the realm of ordered events into the realm of chaos... Revenge
on any meaningful scale will inevitably be portrayed as the diabolical
technology of the Great Satan falling upon innocent soukh and shoeless
felaheen... The trap is baited for the US... We are back to that
place of chaos, twice visited in the last century, where consequence
runs free of human control, where wisdom seems to be of no avail,
and evil seems master of all."
I fear Myers
is right, and that the only thing we can say with any certainty
is that the world will look very different a year or two from now,
probably in some way we cannot even imagine. The events of August
1914 did not seem very important to most people. "It'll be
all over by Christmas," they said. Four years later, 20 million
had died. Four mighty empires (Ottoman, Russian, Austrian, Prussian)
had been toppled, and another, the British, had been holed below
the water line. I fear that, as Myers says, we may be sailing off
the edge of the world, into the realm of chaos. Jeremiah again:
The harvest
is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
|
