HUMMING IN MY UNIVERSE (The Philippine Star) | Updated November 17, 2013 – 12:00am
Illustration by rey rivera
I’m feeling it again. The same sick feeling I felt when the tsunami hit Thailand and other places, and when the deadly Fukushima incident happened.
I find myself easily on the verge of tears. I have cried three times and I still can’t get to the bottom of the sadness in my heart. It is possible that I never will. Every time I see images of what happened last week in Tacloban, Cebu, Capiz, Samar, Aklan and Iloilo, I can’t help but fall into a feeling of helplessness and bafflement. It seems as if the whole earth I stand on has been pulled from under me and I am in a free fall as I speculate on the reasons why tragedy happens.
Tragedy seems to be easily explainable when it happens in far-flung places. One can intellectualize and think and “understand” what just happened. One can easily be objective. Shit happens and the collateral damage is factored in. For example, in the deaths of thousands of people in places we have never visited, a people whose color or ways are just too foreign and different from ours, in such tragedies of epic proportions, we might simply pay homage and respect to with a deep sigh and a silent prayer before going back to our business.
But when it happens to our own home, countrymen, or even relatives in places where we may have been born, grown up or even just visited, the distance and objectivity disappear. There is a deep pain that takes over and turns into a shock to our entire system.
I feel physically, psychologically, mentally, socially, economically and spiritually assaulted in a bad way. And I am not even a victim of Yolanda.
What does it feel like when in just a few hours, you lose your home, loved ones, possessions, your neighborhood, and everything that was your comfort zone transforms into something unrecognizably hellish? What’s it like to not have food, water, shelter, medicines for days? What’s it like to live with the stench of the death of your loved ones whom you cannot bury for personal, religious or logistical reasons? What’s it like to lose the comfort, familiarity and safety of your community, when everything that comprised your life is brutally taken away from you?
I read the blog of DSWD secretary Dinky Soliman who is in the front lines in Tacloban, administering to the walking wounded. In her observation, the lawlessness and looting which spontaneously started on day one was an angry reaction to the sudden, unexplainable loss of everything. She speculated that perhaps people who at other times were friendly, good and decent, were angry at God who had turned their lives completely upside down and destroyed everything they had. The God who ruled much of their lives had abandoned them and they started grasping at anything they could hold on to.
I, too, have been thinking about God in this tragedy. In an essay I wrote when the tsunami in Thailand happened in 2004, I posted a lot of questions about God. I would like to quote extensively from it (published in my book As Is, Where Is) since I am feeling the same way now as I was feeling then.
Where is help going to come from? From God? Who is this God anyway? In times like these, many people, including myself, are tempted to ask if God is a caring God. If He is, then please somebody ask Him why there is so much suffering in this world He created? Why is this God so cold and unfeeling, allowing people, even helpless children to suffer and die painfully and needlessly every single day? I cry as I ask these questions. Why? Because if I cannot turn to God for solace or reasons that make sense, or find in Him some physical relief from the torments of life on earth, then what is really going on?
I feel like a fool as I realize once again that this whole concept of a God of Comfort and Safety, which is my default understanding of Him, has once again turned into a fairy tale. Forgive me for saying this, but a God that allows all this is not an easy God to accept, nor understand.
Yet I still hold deep in my heart and so want to believe that the God I know is love, as so many have said and as I have experienced from time to time. And yet, if all this suffering is a manifestation of His love, then what kind of lover is He? And what kind of ‘loving relationship’ is He trying to have with mankind? Or is this all a joke, another hare-brained take by men on a subject no one really knows anything about?
God seems to periodically retreat from the image we know of Him, (or at least wish Him to be and that is the loving God), and sometimes manifests as a repulsive, cruel and inscrutable deity who must be pleased with blood sacrifice. This is truly a mystery that baffles anyone — even those of great faith.
And this contradictory God, this paradoxical God is where I see an invitation, a challenge to go further in our query and our understanding. Exactly what draws me deeper into a seeming abyss that these questions lead to may be the whole point of it all. And the black hole goes beyond the suffering and right straight to the mystery of a God whose expressions of love can be cruelly inscrutable and baffling.
What is His love all about? What is the love that He speaks of in the light of all this suffering? Sometimes I think that God the Lover wants to up the ante in the relationship by leaving us mystified and thus wanting us to probe deeper. Ponder, ponder, ponder and find out for yourself the ‘love’ in all this.
To engage the hard-to-understand and the seemingly unfathomable aspects of this God is the bait that can lead our consciousness to an ever-growing, ever-expanding and an ever-inquiring one. A consciousness that is willing to go to the edge of everything it knows and take a leap of faith, and hope that it will be rescued by something — anything, hopefully nothing short of a full understanding, or at least some reasons that will pacify or quell our confusion and anger. God seems to be saying, “There’s more to me that you need to understand.”
And in the process, there is more to us that will also come to light about ourselves. So I dare go ahead and ask all these questions. But I must get bigger to find the answers.
God, you draw out everything in me. I still haven’t decided though whether what you bring out is my best or worst. It does not matter. My miniscule understanding of You is once again being challenged and upgraded. And as I am getting bigger, so are You!
Meanwhile, as I waste precious time pondering these ageless, unanswerable theological questions, life must go on. There is much to be done. To wait for a clear answer from God is to waste time.
The typhoon victims must be fed, the dead buried, communities must be rebuilt and life must continue and normalize. For these to be accomplished, donations must be made, food and clothing must be packed and shipped, and funds must be raised now and in the many years to come. This will need a big portion of our personal time, effort, dedication, patience and sense of purpose.
The only response to the meaninglessness of it all is, strangely enough, concrete action. Maybe in so doing, we can find where God really is.