FROM THE BOUNDARY - Act of…? – Part three
“Jesus I trust in you.” Yes, the Jesus of the Divine Mercy. I trust in your unfailing love. I’m not afraid. Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do. You’re my teacher, my friend. You possess my heart. It frustrates me that I can’t do more now. I stay in. I wash my hands. I pray for those on the front line, the afflicted and the dead. I perform what little acts of charity I can. But there’s one thought I still can’t get from my head. I still don’t understand why this is happening to our world, what the Father’s role is in Wimp-terror. Did He send him? What’s He doing about it? If He so loves the world, why does He allow it?
I guess many of us are asking questions like that. We accept He is, as He always is, with the distressed and dying, that He’s at work IN those trying to save us, using our hands as His. We understand the frailty of human life, the urgent call to recognise our common humanity with all those suffering across the world. We know we can follow, as best we can, Jesus’ example of sacrificial love. And we can dwell on the flame of the human spirit which, whatever awaits us, by His grace can never be eclipsed, will never surrender to the darkness. We know that the greater the challenge, the stronger the human spirit becomes. Maybe we accept that God owes us no explanation.
Yet none of that gives us the answer we seek – what the God of love, goodness and mercy was doing the day Wimp raised his clammy hands and began to strike the world. Many are cowering in their homes now. There’s no blood sacrifice, by divine command, above our doors to keep the Wimp away.
So is God angry with us, as my friend Rosa suggests? Did He cause Covid Wimp? Well, suppose Moses, with incense, resurrected as an angelic messenger and gave us the answers. Would we then feel happier, or safer, or more confident in God? Would it take away our fear? Would we say ‘Ah, OK. Now I understand’? Supposing the explanation was that God was worried about population growth and so had embarked on a cosmic culling (even of tigers here and there). Would that – the truth – make us want to reject this God? Or would we say ‘God knows best. That’s OK’? Or supposing the explanation showed that God was simply capricious, or that He was a cosmic sadist, or that He slept a lot and simply didn’t care. Would we want to know or prefer it remain a transcendent mystery?
When we look up into the night sky and see the stars, we see the light of thousands of years. The stars are millions of miles away dressed in aquamarine and sapphire, their crimson halos flicking ruby fingers of flame into the darkness – oh so beautiful. It always makes me, on this tiny planet of ours, feel very, very small. And so I am – a speck, and so we all are. Yet we make ourselves so important, don’t we, the centre of everything? God, if He exists at all, is the God too of that immeasurable firmament in which all things move in their courses. Yet we try to make Him pretty well as small as we are, ‘up there’ somewhere, busily counting up our petty little sins. We can’t conceive of Him as made other than in our image, and so of course attribute to Him all the wonderful human qualities – love, goodness, compassion, forgiveness, patience and the rest. To project upon Him even these, the noblest of concepts, to ascribe to the unknowable the consumption goods of language, might just be as meaningful as spitting in the sea. Oh dear: maybe there are never any answers.
Go safely, then – until the next time.
Seeking, from the boundary: “The truth-seeker’s battle goes on day and night; as long as life lasts it never ceases.”
(Kabir)