[9/2005] The senior physician and CEO for the Appalachia community health center where I work and I have volunteered to be deployed by the federal government’s Health and Human Services Department to assist with the recovery efforts in and around New Orleans. My physician friend’s broad training and experience in the practice of comprehensive primary care with a concentration on poor patients would make him a very valuable asset. The volunteer category nearest to how I might assist is ‘chaplain’. My physician friend feels that my special usefulness would be as a ‘chaplain’ to the medical professionals and other rescue personnel as they bear/process truly awful experiences. We both are anxious to help.
Looking closely at human experience -- without sifting or filtering out any events however severe -- makes me aware that my privileges (e.g., health, education, travel, economic liberties, . . . ) separate me from the vast majority of individuals in human history. Gazing at the devastation left behind by Hurricane Katrina has intensified this awareness.
‘Catastrophe’ . . . ‘disaster’ . . . ‘tsunami’ . . . ‘edge of the abyss’ . . . ‘nightmare’ . . . ‘tragedy’ . . . .
Where do you go in Jewish Scripture to find such raw expressions of trauma, agony, desperation? Several of the prophets lamented, groaned. Habakkuk ventured a protest. But they eventually returned to ‘God’ language within a theological paradigm that implicitly if not explicitly attributed devastating events directly or indirectly to “the Lord’s hands”. Only Ecclesiastes and the extended story/play Job – hardly weight bearing texts within the ‘religious’ sphere – persisted in questioning the intent/character behind “the Lord’s hands” and the underlying theological paradigm.
Where do you go in Christian Scripture for such raw expressions of trauma, agony, desperation? A slave army’s fight for freedom had been crushed. Rome had burned to the ground. Herculaneum and Pompeii had been buried. Jerusalem had been destroyed. What does it mean for there to be no trace of such events in Christian Scripture? no lament, groaning, protest? The theologians – Jewish or Christian – to whom one seeking a ‘face to face with the world’ spirituality and ethics can turn are the few for whom such raw expressions of trauma, agony, desperation keep the ‘God’ question open.
I am very hesitant about the ‘God’ language used -- especially toward the evangelical and fundamentalist end of the theological spectrum -- in reacting to or interpreting utter disasters. I wonder, “Is such ‘God’ language used to relieve the one/s speaking? to capitalize on the survivors’ plight? to defend or ‘clean up’ after ‘God’?”
The attempt to exclude events of immeasurable suffering (e.g., in modern times the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, American slavery, the carnage of World War I, the Nazi Holocaust, Hiroshima, Cambodia, the 2004 Tsunami, . . . Hurricane Katrina) from the reality within which each day is lived can seem worth the effort/cost to those experientially detached from such events. A ‘face to face with the world’ approach to spirituality and ethics fights against this temptation, determined instead to seek deeper consciousness of such events. The liberty (even instruction) in the ‘religious’ sphere -- especially toward the evangelical and fundamentalist end of the theological spectrum -- to keep faith/theology disconnected from and untested by events of immeasurable suffering results in such clashing statements as “The Lord had his reasons” (for permitting/causing Hurricane Katrina) and “We are caring for the evacuees because God expects us to”. A ‘face to face with the world’ approach to spirituality and ethics disagrees with this insulating method, being anchored instead by the resolve to hold only to ideas that are not overwhelmed by such events. The noble and generous expressions of compassion toward survivors when immeasurable suffering is compressed into specific events tend in time to wane as the initial burden of the harmed/displaced is met and as attention returns to less disturbing matters. A ‘face to face with the world’ approach to spirituality and ethics finds in such acute events of immeasurable suffering a reminder that similarly immeasurable suffering is encountered in all directions (diffused throughout) every day.