Since hurricane Isaac is on most everyone’s mind right now, I thought I would engage in a little climatological musing, and perhaps some metaphysical reflection as well. When I was in the insurance business I got told by clients from time to time that it was their understanding that certain “acts of God” weren’t covered by their insurance policy. I would systematically inform them that nowhere in any insurance policy is the term “acts of God.” Imagine the legal quandary, the complicated arguments that language would create in interpreting insurance coverage in a court of law.
First of all the term “acts of God” raises all kinds of red flags for me. I think of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and their ilk….that God actually uses natural disasters to punish sinners (sinners by their own narrow definition of course) And sadly many modern Christians believe that God will alter nature if in our prayers we have enough faith. What would one say about the acts of God, or the love of God to one who lost a child to an illness, while the child with the same illness on the same hospital ward survived. If we pray a hurricane away from Mobile, what about those who end up bearing the brunt of it. Therefore this notion of a God aloof in the heavens who acts intermittently and capriciously bidden by our meagre earthly pleas is untenable for me….What God worth the salt of a god would behave in such a way. I’m not saying not to pray, because praying is focused energy on paying attention…and such paying attention can call us into healing and transforming action…praying is imagining what God sees transpiring in a world which is forever moving toward a great and mysterious good. So our praying opens us to what is expedient in the commonweal of God, it opens us to love.
Our world is a rich tapestry of light and dark, of love and loss, of death and life, of violence and peace, of sorrow and joy, of indignity and empowered agency. Hegel saw the world as an infinite menagerie of opposites in dialectical engagment, and that the integration and synthesis of these opposites brought about new life and transformation….he saw this in the natural world and in the socio-economic and political world as well… Our world is a world that is rife with beauty and danger. We humans live solely in order to see that within this rich and often chaotic mystery, God’s goodness and order are brought to bear. In the Katrina event ( a man made disaster not a natural one!) we saw and still see cardinal acts of love which are transforming the city of New Orleans, and it has been and will continue to be a right messy one, but God inhabits the mess, always, whatever mess befalls us….God inhabits the whole of creation and it is for us empowered by God’s Spirit among us to act on God’s behalf to keep the process of creation alive for this great good that unfolds before us….in spite of wars and famines and droughts (many man made and many of these so-call inevitable evils can be challenged by intelligent compassion)…. and in spite of dangerous hurricanes about their tasks of cooling the earth, sending warm equatorial waters out into the respective hemispheres…an ecological neccesity… and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions stabilizing painfully the crust of the earth upon which we live…all of this a beautiful, creative, improvised and risky order…..Sally McFague former professor of theology at Vanderbilt University called the natural world of earth and the far reaches of the universe, “the body of God,” a body that exults and suffers, lives and dies only to be reborn again and again….and we an intimate part of this body…and ours is to act as if this is so, a cardinal definition of faith, acting as if. In the beginning God called the whole of creation good…I propose we act to do the same….in our suffering and in our exultation.
