Reflection - The everywhere God

03.08.2009

Recently, over 1000 people were killed in Gaza and 155 people walked away from a plane crash in the USA. In Lower Hutt, I officiated at the funeral of a five month old baby. Faced with these realities I find myself pondering again the nature of divine providence. How do we talk about and relate to God in a way that acknowledges both the 155 that were saved and the 1000 and the 1 who died?

It is easy to give thanks to God when 155 people survive a plane crash. It is not so easy to see how God is at work in Gaza or the death of a child. There is a line of thinking that associates good things happening with being blessed by God and bad things as punishment for sin. This kind of direct connection between suffering and sin is strongly challenged in the book of Job. It's resisted by Jesus in the story of the man born blind where in answer to the question "who sinned this man or his parents for him to be born blind?" he says that neither sinned. This is not to say that sin does not have consequences; it does.

But a direct connection between suffering and sin fails to account for the suffering of the innocent (Job's story) nor does it account for the fact that some evil people seem to prosper. The image of God that is created by this connection is one that many reject. It is clear that the experience of suffering has created much anguish and deep questions about God for many people. Some have come to deeper faith as a result of suffering but others have not and many find it hard to continue to believe.

I have to admit that I have yet to find or to articulate for myself a way to talk about Providence that incorporates both the suffering and the saved. But I have recently found a couple of helpful ideas.

The first is the idea of an "everywhere" God to use the language of Michael Morwood. Our tradition has put a strong emphasis on God's separation from us. Much of the language of our liturgical prayer suggests an "elsewhere" God, distant from us who sends Jesus into the world, to bridge the gap that sin has created. The root of this tradition lies in the doctrine of original sin. But there is another tradition that some call 'original blessing' which emphasises the closeness of God.

God's communication with us is not dependent on human sin. Its roots lie in the very nature of God as relational. In Jesus there emerged in the history of the universe a person who was consistently aware of, open to and uniquely responsive to the loving presence of God. By his words and example he seeks to awaken us to the presence of this 'everywhere' God. So suffering or saved we are always "in God."

The second idea comes from the reflections of John Polkinghorne on science and providence. He speaks of an "emergent universe" in which there is not only consistency and predictability but also the possibility of novelty and freedom. God works through the given structure of the universe and the cosmic process is such that it has within itself an unpredictable flexibility.  Unexpected things happen. Some of these are good like the emergence of life on this planet; others are not so good like natural disasters, sickness and death. They are all part of the bargain of living in an evolving universe.

The fundamental issue might not be so much about belief or unbelief but about the way we image God. Even though our language will never be adequate to the mystery of God, the image of an everywhere God working in and through an emergent universe allows me a bit more room to deal with the 155, the 1000 and
the 1.

Fr Patrick O'Shea lives at St Columban's, Lower Hutt, New Zealand.