Tsunamis in the best of all possible worlds.

by Jesse Sunenblick

On Christmas night I opened gifts beside a friend who received Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa, the story of the 1883 earthquake that killed 40,000 people in what is now Indonesia. The next day a tsunami that would prove to be even more devastating struck the same region of the world. It’s instinctive, as The New York Times wrote in an editorial a day later, as the death toll began its steady climb, for humans to search for the meaning of an event like this, but what kind of reasonable answer can be found? The Times, for its part, began its coverage with this editorial, a straightforward account of the disaster which in its fifth and final paragraph took a sudden turn:

“…except for our obligations to help the victims in any way we can, the underlying story of this tragedy is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth’s surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them.”

The phrase “overpowering, amoral mechanics” seemed callous in the immediate aftermath of an event that most people were still trying to comprehend: an untimely speculation on meaning in stark scientific language. The word “amoral” was picked up in several letters to the editor. It suggested that the tsunami’s destruction is above right and wrong, when, as one letter noted, “There is an implication that when faced with the ‘amoral mechanics’ of the earth, we can only recognize the ephemeral nature of our presence on it. Yet the cause and effects of the tsunami that struck the Indian Ocean coastline have been known for nearly a century. Many lives could have been saved through public awareness programs that urge simple actions.”

“Amoral phenomenons produce immoral episodes of grief and loss,” the letter continued. “Natural hazards are inevitable; natural disasters are not.”

But the word “amoral,” as the Times used it, seemed less a reference to the human failure to prepare for the catastrophe, than an attempt to cast the discussion of the tsunami in non-religious language. As though editors at the Times, wary of the culture-war God-talk during and after the presidential election, had wanted to plant a phrase in our heads to prepare us for the inevitable inundation of religious explanations that are a natural consequence of such disasters. A preemptive disclaimer that what insurance agencies term an “act of God,” need not be evidence of divine will.

Of course, the religious explanations did come. Incomprehension became confusion, and then anger, and the age-old conundrum that cuts across all faiths surfaced: how could the divine, in its benevolence, allow this to happen? Pastor Carolyn Winfrey Gazelle of the Limestone Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware wrote a hymn asking: “O God, that great tsunami has stunned us one and all; Our neighbors reel in anguish while homes and cities fall. O God of wind and water who made the sea and sky, Amid such great destruction, we mournfully ask ‘Why?'”

Hindu pundits in India called the tsunami a “vengeful act of god” in retaliation for the arrest of the county’s foremost religious leader, the Kanchi Seer, on a murder charge in November, and a newspaper columnist for Rediff also insinuated as much. (Navya Shastra, a Michigan-based Hindu activist group, quickly condemned this.) “G-d is angry,” proclaimed Israel’s chief Sephardi Rabbi, Shlomo Amer. Buddhist monkson the one-time island paradise of Phuket, Thailand, offered food, water and prayers for the lonely, lost spirits of the dead, so they “might enter heaven” (it’s unclear from thisWashington Post report whether “heaven” was the journalist’s word, or that of the monks he spoke with). And 30 percent of respondents to a Beliefnet poll believe the tsunami was sent by god for an unknowable purpose.

On the Christian fringes, the Rapture Ready website quoted the Gospel of Luke in their “End Time News Bites” to speculate on the tsunami’s role in the apocalypse: “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.” But if it’s not the end-times, it could still be homosexuals, according to the tediousWestboro Baptist Church, which grabbed for the limelight again by calling the Swedish death count an act of divine retribution for the imprisonment of a Swedish Pentecostal minister who had made anti-gay remarks. “How many tsunami-dead Swedes are fags and dykes?” asked Westboro Pastor Fred Phelps. “Vacationing on their fat expendable incomes without kids to bother with and spend money on?”

While most evangelicals are appalled by the stunts of the Westboro Baptists, the cartoonist Dan Lacey, creator of Faithmouse, a daily Christian cartoon syndicated on conservative websites, offered brimstone-lite, drawing a blue-skinned vacationer in a mumu, lounging with cocktail and new-age Gaia book in hand, as the tsunami towers overhead. A yet-gentler sermon will likely become the moral of the story: This isn’t God’s judgement, but an opportunity for Christians to help and share with the victims both their money, and their Word.

On the other hand, a litany of voices take the position that it’s inappropriate to talk about the tsunami as a product of God’s will. Writing for the conservative website Useless Knowledge,Lynchburg Ledgercolumnist Robert Paul Reyes framed the question made famous by Job: “If God is good and all powerful, then why is there suffering? Either the Supreme Being is not as benevolent as we thought or not as omnipotent as we imagined.”

There are shades of gray to behold, however, and some of the most insightful commentary comes from scholars and theologians who have long pondered the question of theodicy: an attempt to reconcile the existence of both a loving God, and real evil in the world. These scholars are willing to accept an inherent degree of the unknown, of the sublime, in religious faith — a kind of middle ground between The New York Times’attempt to neutralize the catastrophe, and the wholesale acceptance of it as God’s will.

“I want to start with the fact that I do not know,” writes Tikkun editor Rabbi Michael Lerner. “That there is a limitation of knowledge and understanding built into being a human being at this stage in the development of the consciousness of the universe. I was not there when the foundations of the universe were being put together — and that is a point that was made too in the Book of Job long ago when he similarly questioned the lack of justice in the world God had designed.”

Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, the philosopher Edward Spence offered the compromise of Epicurianism, and the notion of evil “…not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a mystery to be experienced.”

In England, as Stephen Bates writes in The Guardian, “Christians stressed God’s presence with the suffering, Hindus reconciled themselves to fate, the Chief Rabbi composed a prayer and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, wrote an article for The Sunday Telegraph.” The Telegraph article featured an extraordinary headline — “Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘This has made me question God’s existence'” — and the seat of the bishop, Lambeth Palace, quickly proclaimed that Dr. Williams’ words had been misconstrued. Far from doubting the existence of God, said the Palace, the Archbishop had instead merely hypothesized that it would be wrong for Christians not to question what God was up to.

Dr. Williams wrote: “If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God?” Dr. Williams responded. “Wouldn’t we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties…”

Also in The Guardian, theologian Martin Kettle rather bluntly contextualized the challenge that the tsunami poses to religion. “There is, after all, only one big question to ask about an event of such destructive power as the one that has taken place this week: why did it happen?” To answer this, Kettle applies a historical antecedent that might serve us well to consider: the 1755 earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Lisbon, Portugal, that killed 90,000 people, led to the expulsion of the Jesuits (some of whom combed the city in the days following the disaster, hanging those whom they thought had incurred God’s wrath) and the secularization of the entire country, shook Voltaire’s optimism to the point that he took up his pen and wrote Candide, and, depending to who you talk to, either cemented the fate of reason over religious faith, or provided the ultimate test for religious faith. That event “shook the modern world…” notes the Lutheran minister and professor Martin Marty, in a recent article in The Washington Post, changing people’s perception of a benevolent god.

Voltaire, for his part, trudged about in a depressive fugue, no longer certain that everything, as the earliest principles of optimism or theodicy declared, was for the best. The Age of Reason was drawing to a close. At one point towards the end of Candide, our beleaguered traveler says, “Optimism is a mania for maintaining that things are going well when things are going badly.” That idea translates well today on the battlefield of Iraq, perhaps with overtones of Machiavellianism. With respect to natural disasters like the recent tsunami, however, we are not even falsely optimistic; we are unfeeling. As the “overpowering mechanics” of the earth are amoral, without right or wrong, we employ the word “natural” to dispense with guilt as well. All is not for the best, but neither is it for the worse. There is simply no blame to be placed, and this protects us.

Jesse Sunenblick is a writer living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review and The Revealer.