Like all of you, I awoke on the morning of Monday 6th February to hear the shocking news, and see some of truly disturbing footage and photographs, of the huge earthquake in Turkey and Syria. As I publish this piece five days later, 24,208 people are dead and many, many more thousands are injured, and these numbers will only continue to rise.
After such horrific events, priests and pastors in theistic religions are often expected by their congregations somehow to “justify the ways of god to man”, a phrase taken, as many of you will know, from the opening stanza of Milton’s poem “Paradise Lost”:
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast[e]
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe . . .
I may assert eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.”
(Book I, Lines 1-3 & 25-26)
This poem is an example of a theodicy in which a theologian — or in this case a poet — tries to show how an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving God is consistent with the existence of evil and suffering in the world. But, it has always been my inability to believe any such justifications of the theistic God that eventually turned me into the Christian atheist/non-theist I am. A key moment on my journey to this position was when I came across a version of some questions first posed by Epicurus (from De Ira Dei by Lactantius):
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?” (cf. David Hume, “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, Part XI).
In all cases, as a minister of religion, I haven’t been able to justify the ways of the God of theism to anyone for decades. But, despite this, this doesn’t mean I have been forced helplessly to look upon a catastrophe like this earthquake and then despair of being able to say anything that might prove helpful to at least some people.
I know of no better and more succinct, accessible, beautiful and moving expressing of what I think can and needs to be said than by this poem by Mary Oliver called, “Black Bear in the Orchard.”
It was a long winter.
But the bees were mostly awake
in their perfect house,
the workers whirling their wings
to make heat.
Then the bear woke,
too hungry not to remember
where the orchard was,
and the hives.
He was not a picklock.
He was a sledge that leaned
into their front wall and came out
the other side.
What could the bees do?
Their stings were as nothing.
They had planned everything
sufficiently
except for this: catastrophe.
They slumped under the bear’s breath.
They vanished into the curl of tongue.
Some had just enough time
to think of how it might have been—
the cold easing,
the smell of leaves and flowers
floating in,
then the scouts going out,
then their coming back, and their dancing—
nothing different
but what happens in our own village.
What pity for the tiny souls
who are so hopeful, and work so diligently
until time brings, as it does, the slap and the claw.
Someday, of course, the bear himself
will become a bee, a honey bee, in the general mixing.
Nature, under her long green hair,
has such unbendable rules,
and a bee is not a powerful thing, even
when there are many,
as people, in a town or a village.
And what, moreover, is catastrophe?
Is it a sharp sword of God,
or just some other wild body, loving its life?
Not caring a whit, black bear
blinks his horrible, beautiful eyes,
slicks his teeth with his fat and happy tongue,
and saunters on.
(From: New and Selected Poems, Vol 2)
With Mary Oliver’s words in mind, this morning, I simply want to encourage you to consider this basic thought, namely, that neither this earthquake, nor any other catastrophe of any kind, such as the bear’s slap and claw, is “the sharp sword of God.” It never has been, and never will be. They are all expressions of the wild body of the material world loving its life.
If this thought is correct, then the task for we humans, following any catastrophe, is not to waste time justifying to ourselves the ways of some putative, all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving God but, instead, to find the best way to ensure that all the material movements of our own wild bodies continue only to be expressions of loving life; not only loving our own and our neighbour’s life — which, remember, must always include, as Jesus taught, our enemy’s life — but also loving life as a whole as it is expressed through the movements of our earthquake prone Mother Earth, our brother and sister creatures like other humans, bears and bees, and our cousins such as leaves and flowers.
And the ultimate wager lying behind this non-theistic attitude to life?
Well, it is summed up by Oliver when she says that, in the end, the very end, after the slap and the claw of existence, the bear himself will “become a bee, a honey bee, in the general mixing.”
Oliver’s words are an affirmation of some other words by the eighteenth-century Universalist, George de Benneville (1703-1793) that I say each week in our Sunday service, namely, that “the inner spirit makes us feel that behind every appearance of diversity there is an interdependent unity of all things.”
It is our free religious tradition’s intuition that this is true that calls us again and again to find ways, as de Benneville goes on to say, “to preach the universal and everlasting gospel of boundless, universal love for the entire human race, without exception, and for each one in particular.”
As we have all seen this week, this universal and everlasting gospel of boundless, universal love is being expressed in countless, astonishing ways through the movements and moving acts of bravery, forbearance, love and compassion shown by all those ordinary people who must now remake their broken homes as the bees in Oliver’s poem will have had to remake their broken hives.
So, inadequately to conclude. I realize, of course, that following the slap and claw of Mother Earth’s quake it remains painfully true we cannot directly help the ongoing, moving movement of wild Turkish and Syrian bodies loving life. However, as the difficult weeks and months unfold, various ways will show up to us — perhaps such as donating the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal — by which, in small, but life-loving ways, we will be able to support our Turkish and Syrian brothers and sisters, so they can move slowly towards that time when they will feel the cold easing and the smell of leaves and flowers will once again come floating in to their homes.
May it be so. May it be so. Amen.