The hope of the people is strong just like the bananas which grow in spite of the destruction and the ruins; photo: Michael Heinz SVD  | A day or two after the disaster, I was in the chapel still trying to re-adjust my mind and come to terms with the horror and grief of the world. Hilda handed me one of her albums. I opened it at random to acknowledge her kindness and found before me the picture of a great seascape with the words: "CELEBRATE the power of God." That is where we have to look. 'Great moments always surprise you. The routine is broken and unexpected crevices appear on the surface of your life. Such moments dowse you - they make you realise that within you is 'eternity'.' (John O'Donohue) A disaster has struck this fragile globe: one moment sunshine and laughter, children splashing about in the waves, tourists basking in the sunshine, fishermen mending their nets. Suddenly Tsunami engulfs the scene: twenty thousand people disappear, the landscape a wilderness, orphaned children bewildered, screaming for their parents no longer there, fathers and mothers seeking their children with nothing to offer but their love: a complete disruption of human life. My comfortable notion of a caring father has been shattered. The fatherhood I could recognise even the flash of bird's wing, the love which permeated all creation has turned sour. 'You show me two faces,
that of a flower opening
and of a fist contracting
like the gripping of ice. You speak to me with two
voices, one thundering
on the ear's drum, the other
an unmistakable silence. (R.S. Thomas) I am left estranged, barren, homeless, no place to turn, alienated from the place I thought I held in the creative mind of God. I opened the book of job:
'Terrors turn to meet me, my confidence is blown away as if by the wind; my hope of safety passes like a cloud.' (30: 15)
'I cry to you, you give me no answer. I stand before you but you take no notice.' (30:20)
Then, from the heart of the tempest Yahweh gave job his answer. He said 'Brace yourself like a fighter. Now it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me.' 'The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a place?
I hurled out wings that sped
And fled with the wing of the heart
to the heart of the Host.' Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Tell me since you are so well-informed! Who decided the dimensions of it, do you know? Who pent up the sea behind closed doors when it leapt tumultuous out of the womb, when I wrapped it in a robe of mist and made black clouds its swaddling bands?’ I own I have been asking the wrong questions. I turn to the New Testament: ‘O the depth of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, how untraceable his ways! Who knows the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counsellor? (Rom. 11:33) But there is something else which must help me refine my place in creation: the awareness of its incompleteness. Paul gives a clue in Romans 8:19. ‘Up to the present we know the whole created universe groans in all its parts as if in the pangs of child-birth. Not only so, but even we, to whom the spirit is given … are groaning inwardly while we are waiting on God to make us his sons, and set the whole body free.’ I now acknowledge the birthpangs of the creation of a suffering world, material and spiritual. The suffering world and man’s involvement in it is inexorably brought to a climax by the question posed by the stranger on the road to Emmaus. It is a shocking question but I recall the stranger had prepared the minds of the travellers by unfolding the history of Israel and the place of the one who himself had experienced the horrors and sufferings of death and resurrection. It may be some time before I … we … can again read these lines of Gerald Manley Hopkins’ ‘And for all this nature is never spent;
there lies the dearest freshness deep down things;
And thought the last lights off the black West went
Oh! Morning on the brown bring eastward springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah!
Bright wings’ Margaret Tindal rscj
Province of England- Wales
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