FINDING THE STONE OF HOPE
February 06, 2005 The Reverend Anne Felton Hines
I received a painful e-mail a few days ago, from the minister of the San Dieguito Fellowship where I served for over 15 years. She told me of the sudden death of Michael, the only child of a couple who had begun attending during my ministry there. Michael had been about six years old when they first came; I remember him and his mother singing a duet together for a talent show; I remember how devoted they were to each other. Of course, Michael was no longer six at the time of his death. He was old enough to drive, and had apparently been test-driving a motorcycle when he lost control of it and crashed.
How will those parents – especially Michael’s mother – survive this tragedy? Where will they find hope? What of God or the Universe can they now trust?
The story of Job in the Jewish Scripture is one of the most powerful stories in the Bible, told and re-told throughout the ages, because it wrestles with these questions. It’s about a man devoted to God, whose life is suddenly turned upside down by a series of tragedies – all because God makes a wager with Satan that Job will remain faithful to Him no matter what befalls him.
God wins the bet. In one day, Job loses his livestock, most of his servants, and all his children. But still he remains faithful to his God. Even when his body breaks out with painful ulcers, he does not turn his back on God.
But Job does dare to challenge God – to raise his fist in outrage and demand an answer to the injustice dealt him. But the only answer he receives is that as a mere mortal, he has no right to expect an answer; who is he to expect understanding of the mysteries of the Divine. The Creator of the Universe, he is told, does not have to explain Himself.
Is this the answer that my former parishioners will receive at the loss of their beloved child? When they cry out in anguish the universal question of “Why? What did we do to deserve this?;” when they and their loved ones shout in outrage, “Where is the God of Love and Compassion and Mercy?,” what answer will they hear?
In a poem titled, “Psalm of Job,” which she wrote for an Old Testament class when she was a Seminary student with me, Barbara Pescan wrote these words:
I have seen you in your creation:
In the wings of the hawk…her flight…
I have seen you in all good and gentle things.
I have heard you bellowing in the heaps of dying animals;
You cry my name
from the rubble where children are buried.
I have cursed you and demanded your answer –
You have been silent.
I rage. I call your name. And I hear your answer –
In the parched grasses bent to the hard earth;
In the fire that eats and spits out burning char.
You are an absence, your name is all that is left behind.
I will search the face of the void. I will continue to ask.
For this question is all I have;
This…and my eyes, which seek to see you face to face.
*****
God never does give Job an answer to his questions, nor does he grant Job a face-to-face meeting. Instead, he gives this faithful man a new set of children and livestock and servants – as if that should compensate for the losses. But how could it?
The story of Job poses the question all humanity asks in the midst of great sorrow: Why did this happen? Where was God? Why did God allow this to occur?
The first humans developed a simple theology to explain events beyond their control: A Divine Presence – whether one god or many, whether male or female – had created all that is, giving abundant harvests and shelter from the elements when it favored them, but causing a parched land, or fierce storms when it was angry at them.
Even today, with all our knowledge of science, we still ask the ancient questions of Why? And come up with answers that aren’t always much different from those of our ancestors: God is punishing us for our failings. Or God has a grand plan that we cannot possibly understand. Or more modern theologies which contend that everything happens for a reason; God or the Universe causes tragedies to occur in order to teach us something, and our task is to discern the lesson. I was even told once that the death of a teenager for whom I was doing a memorial service had been her choice – that we all choose when we’re to be born and when we’re to die! All these answers are created to bring us some kind of comfort – to help us feel less abandoned by a powerful and supposedly merciful God. But they do not work for all of us.
After the horrific tragedy that occurred December 26th in Southeast Asia, the world was stunned at the vastness of destruction, bewildered as to how so many innocent people – particularly children – could be snuffed out with such carelessness? Where was God? Why would God allow this to happen? Somehow, the scientific explanation wasn’t enough; we wanted to understand how life and death could be so random.
So in the days that followed the disaster, we began to hear other explanations. According to one resident who survived, the Tsunami convinced people who had begun to doubt, that there is, indeed, a god, and that that God had “brought these great floods as a warning…a sign to live according to your religion” – no matter what that religion was.
People pointed to religious buildings and icons that were spared, while entire neighborhoods surrounding those buildings were destroyed, and deduced that this was a sign of God’s hand in the event – ignoring the fact that the religious structures were built far stronger and bigger than other buildings. A person’s own survival, too, was seen as Divine Providence: clearly God had heard their prayers, and responded by saving them and their family.
But the explanations given don’t answer the question that I hear most often: What kind of a God would allow – perhaps even cause – such cruelty? If God is all-powerful and all-merciful, how could He let this happen? It is the kind of question that has often provoked individuals to give up their belief in God entirely, rather hearing no satisfactory answer.
I remember when I was in high school and was dating a boy who was an atheist – the first I’d ever met! He would often pose that very question to my mother: If God is so merciful, why would he allow a child to die in an auto accident? And Mom would gently answer that he was asking the wrong question. “God doesn’t allow that to happen,” she’d say. “God has given us Free Will, and is just as grief-stricken as we are when a child dies.”
So I was surprised when, after the Tsunami disaster, my mother said, “It makes me wonder if there really is a God, if He’d allow this kind of thing to happen.” Sometimes even a theology of an all-loving God that is not all-powerful, who shares with us our grief as well as our joy, goes out of focus in the face of such immense tragedy.
The question for me when watching the pictures of the Tsunami aftermath wasn’t so much about God’s presence – or lack thereof. The question that kept plaguing me was how those survivors would go on. Where in the world would they find that “stone of hope” which Martin Luther King, Jr. assured us we would “hew out of the mountain of despair?” Why would they even want to find hope, or the strength to go on?
Theologian Paul Tillich contended that, “Faith is being grasped by the power of Love.” I imagine this is what happened to UUA President Bill Sinkford, who, you may recall, felt “grasped” by such a power as he sat at the hospital bedside of his critically-ill son several years ago. “I suddenly felt a Presence,” he told us at my Installation, “that enveloped me with love and strength; and I knew that that Presence was with my son as well.” In a way, one could say that Rev. Sinkford came face-to-face with God in that moment – a God of immense love and compassion.
Somewhere in Christian Scripture, it is written that “God is Love, and (we) who abide in Love, abide in God, and God in (us).” And it may be that there is a force of pure Love in the Universe that we can name as God – that wraps itself around us in times of great sorrow or fear, and whispers in our ear, “Be not afraid; you are not alone; I will not abandon you.” I pray that the parents of Michael in my former congregation, and the survivors of the Tsunami – as well as all those who suffer the results of war, poverty, disease and other calamities – feel the arms of such a Divine Love, and hear its words of comfort.
We may shake our fists in anger and fear, demanding from God some answers to the tragedies of life. But if we stop for a moment, we may come face-to-face with the God of Love as manifested in the beauty of the world that does not die – in the loveliness of the earth, the warmth of the sun by day, and the splendor of the stars by night. These are all gifts that can sustain us and give us strength.
We may come face-to-face with the Holy Spirit of Love when we remember the ongoing force of Life itself; that, too, does not die. Viktor Frankl tells of a woman he knew in a concentration camp who was slowly dying. She told him that every day she would look outside a window at a chestnut tree. She could see only one branch of it, and on that branch were two blossoms. She would talk to that tree, she said, and the tree would respond, “I am here – I am here – I am life, eternal life.”
On the days following the 9/11 disaster, many people posted messages on the “message board” of a website called “Beliefnet.” One such message read, “How can I sleep? Prayers are said with every breath. And yet, amidst all this, I received news that my godson was born. Life.”
But perhaps the most important way in which we come face-to-face with the God of Love is when it is manifested through the compassion of human beings. Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong writes: “Love comes to consciousness in the human experience…making life possible and creating wholeness….We…make God visible,” he says, “not by receiving an external revelation from on high, but by the human act of loving wastefully.” God is made visible by our loving wastefully – with no concern for results, or whether we’ll have enough love – only knowing that Love is endless and effortless.
We saw this Love after the World Trade towers were hit on 9/11. Firefighters and other professionals risked their lives – and in many cases lost their lives – in order to try to save the victims. But what was perhaps even more moving were the stories of people inside the buildings who stayed behind to help others escape, and in many instances, lost their own lives doing so. That kind of love isn’t something that kicks in only after we weigh all the arguments; it’s a greater love that seems to infuse us from beyond ourselves.
We saw this love immediately after the Tsunami hit. Again, people risking their own lives to save strangers. Citizens from around the world traveling there to help out in whatever way they could. And of course, people in religious communities such as ours, contributing huge amounts of money to help ease the pain of those who survived.
I know that the people at the San Dieguito Fellowship are wrapping Michael’s parents in that endless and effortless love today. It is a profound Love that breaks our hearts open when we learn of the deaths of innocent people – sometimes people we do not know, yet somehow grieve their loss, and grieve for the loss to their loved ones. That love may be the purpose of our existence.
Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in L.A. writes, “We are people of broken and yearning hearts. And of love.” It is this love that is the “still, small voice” within us, always singing, always hopeful, always faithful.
It is this human Love that can give victims of tragedy the faith to go on with living. In the midst of the “mountain of despair,” they experience the abiding God of Love through other human beings – through you and me – and begin to discover the “stone of hope.”
A number of years after writing her poem about Job, Barbara Pescan wrote this one, called
“Love Abides”:
Often we are found in our grief and comforted,
calmed by some kindness,
brought alive again by beauty
that catches us undefended.
Even when the sun is most thin and far,
even at the hour the storm is at its height,
we can go through;
Renewal nests within sorrow;
Love abides, even beyond anger, beyond death.
We are held in an embrace invisible but infinite,
moving with all creation,
between wholeness and fragmentation,
moving always toward the one.
Small joys and great sorrows pass,
and we, with steps uncertain, move on
to whatever is next;
but continually seen, heard, held
By Life infinite and remote, intimate and abiding.
Love, do not let us go.
Amen.
© 2005 Anne Felton Hines. All rights reserved.
