Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

11.00: Deceased members of the Lee family.
6.30: Joe Cloherty, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

Nature dealt China a terrible blow on Monday last. A 7.9 earthquake ripped through Wenchuan county, area of 4084 square kilometres (about the size of Belgium) and a population of just over 106,000. Official figures put the death toll over 20,000. But experts now reckon that double that figure may give a more realistic final body count. That amounts to almost 50% of the population of that county. That is an enormous disaster. The suffering of those unfortunate people is beyond the imagination of those of us not involved.

As happens after all major disasters, the question is asked: 'Where was God when this was happening?' We face the old dilemma: if he could prevent it but didn't bother, then he is evil. If he couldn't prevent it, then he is useless! If this is the case, then we should simply extend to him the charity of our unbelief!

Of course, the question needs to be kept in perspective. Many calamities are clearly the result of human sin. During the twentieth century hundreds of millions of people, about one in every twenty, died through atrocities which human beings inflicted on each other. By comparison these creation calamities are small, perhaps by a factor of ten thousand. We can't hold God accountable for human sin, even though God takes responsibility for its solution.

But who is accountable for natural disasters? Some see them as signs of God's judgment on sin. Earthquakes, storms and floods come from God's disapproval of human behaviour, specifically punishing wrongdoers. This attitude is commonly found among Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists. They apply it (sometimes with unholy glee) to the AIDS epidemic. Yet the innocent also perish. The poor and vulnerable suffer. And when Jesus himself faced a question in these terms he dismissed the idea. This is not punishment. God's rain falls, and God's sun shines on the just and unjust, on good and evil alike. God seeks human repentance, not human suffering.

Challenges to faith are hardly new. 'Theological questions' have always been asked in the aftermath of disasters. Its what psychologists call projection - in this case projecting on to God an aspect of our situation that we find hard to come to terms with, namely our powerlessness in the face of nature. An unexamined assumption of our technological age is that the world is in the end controllable. If we have enough knowledge and enough power we can make everything subject to our will. When natural disasters undermine these foolish assumptions, we turn to theology.

Perhaps a better starting point is to ask practical rather than theoretical questions, not 'How do you explain God' but 'How do you find God'? What religious rituals and practices - praying, lighting candles, reading scriptures - what they do is not explain but sustain. They mediate the presence of God at moments of deepest darkness. Just at the point where we feel abandoned by God, we are most likely to find his presence - not in theoretical explanations but in comforting, religious ritual.

-Dick Lyng

INVITATION

Anywhere and always just as you expect it least,
Welling or oozing from nowhere a desire to feast.

At Auschwitz Wolf hums Brahms' rhapsody by heart
As Eddy, thief-turned-juggler, rehearses his art.

Fling and abandon, gaieties colourful and porous.
The Mexican beggar's skirt, an Araner's crios.

Irresistible laughter, hiss and giggle of overflow.
That Black engine-driver crooning his life's motto:

'Paint or tell a story, sing or shovel coal,
You gotta get a glory or the job lacks soul.'

Abundance of joy bubbling some underground jazz.
A voice whispers: Be with me tonight in paradise.

-Micheal O'Siadhail.

CONCERTS IN AUGUSTINIAN THIS WEEKEND

Sunday 18th May at 8.00pm: University of Southern Indiana Chamber Choir in aiding Aids West. Rooted in its Catholic mission, Clarke College was founded in 1843 by a very interesting Irish woman, Mary Frances Clarke. She had founded a religious congregation for young women, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs). When the community arrived in the river town of Dubuque in 1833, it was pioneer territory; though the city has changed radically in succeeding years, its vibrancy and Mississippi river beauty continue.

Monday 19th May at 8.00pm: Clarke Collegiate Singers and Clarke Cantable Singers, Dubuque, Iowa.

Witticisms of the Wise

JESUIT LECTURE IN CROI NUA

An expert on the St. Ignatius and the Jesuits, Ronald Modras, will explore the impact of the Jesuits on the 16th century, and their abiding influence today. Dr. Ronald Modras is Professor of Theology at St. Louis University and is an internationally recognised expert on the Renaissance and Reformation. His best-known book is called 'Ignatian Humanism'. His talk will be held at Croi Nua, Rosary Lane, Taylor's Hill at 8.00pm on Wednesday week, May 28th. Admission is free.

A RUNAWAY WORLD

Human beings have always had to cope with risk, the risk of plagues, bad harvests, storms, drought, and the occasional invasion of barbarians. But these were largely external risks, beyond our control. But now we are principally at risk from what we ourselves have done, what Anthony Giddens calls 'manufactured risk': global warming, overpopulation, pollution, unstable markets, unforeseen consequences of genetic engineering. We do not know the effects of what we are now doing. We live in a runaway world. This produces profound anxiety. We Christians have no special knowledge about the future. We too are haunted by the anxiety of our contemporaries.

But in this runaway world, what Christians offer is not knowledge but wisdom, the wisdom of humanity's ultimate destination, the Kingdom of God. The globalised world is rich in knowledge. We are drowning in information, but thirsting for wisdom. Indeed such is our anxiety about the future that is easier not to think about it at all. Our offering to the world will be the wisdom of the end towards which we are called, a wisdom which liberates us from anxiety.

-Timothy Radcliffe, O.P.

Top

Valid HTML 4.01 Strict