Disasters

I'm currently in the middle of Against Ethics by John Caputo, a book which raises many interesting issues. The one I want to explore now is the problem of disasters. As Caputo describes, a disaster is that which forces one to "lose one's star (dis-astrum), to be cut loose from one's lucky or guiding light." Disasters are the classic problem of evil, they confront us with unrecoverable loss. Disasters are not simply pain or suffering which can lead to growth, but, like the death of a promising child, destroy such that the destroyed cannot be recovered and such that nothing is gained on the side. In this sense, they act like explosives against our systematic, logical ways of conceptualizing and ordering life; they introduce an uncaring chaos, demonstrating in a very real and difficult to deny way that the principles we use to organize life fail to account for these events. Thus they cut us off from the stars, from our astronomical hopes. They eliminate our capital letter answers, whether those be from Religion, Science, Ethics, etc. What counts as a disaster for one person may not act in the same way one another, but the point is that disasters, when we experience them, shatter our ordered, comfortable ways of seeing the world by exposing these constructions as fraudulent, for they fail to encompass the kind of destruction associated with the disaster. Thus the Holocaust was a disaster for many Jews and others around the world. Other examples could be the death of one's mother due to stroke, the death of a child during delivery, or the death of a friend in a car accident. Such events often serve to violently destroy the ways we think about the world, often by violating our ways of thinking about good, evil, suffering, God, etc.

From Caputo's discussion of disasters, I have been influenced to take seriously the disasters we experience. Rather than sweeping them under the rug with a "God has a plan even though we don't understand it," I find myself needing to deal more seriously with disasters. It feels dishonest, irresponsible, and wrong for me to respond to one who can no longer see the stars by insisting that they really are there. I find myself needing to process with them from their current position, meeting them where they are. Part of this is Lyotard's "incredulity towards metanarratives," but beyond that I simply can't ignore the fact that I could be wrong and the stars I think I see may just be a clever social construction I've adopted.

This issue immediately brings Job to mind, so I want to work within that narrative for a bit. Two crucial observation: 1) Job never curses God, and 2) God berates Job's three friends for the answers they give Job. While it might seem that this story disagrees with my stance towards disasters, as Job never stops "believing in God," I would argue that a more nuanced reading fits well into this pattern. Moving beyond our modern preoccupation with believing that God exists, I see the stars in this story as the conventional understanding of how God works where the good are rewarded and the evil are punished for their sins. Job's evocative speeches capture one caught by disaster; his worldview is shattered, he is reeling, trying to make sense of a world which no longer seems to obey the rules he thought governed it. His friends insist that the stars still exist, but in the end God severely chastises them. (As a side note, Job's act of questioning God's fairness amounts, in his socioreligious context to what for us would be saying one no longer "believes in God," meaning one no longer believes that God exists.)

The crucial point of God's speeches to Job is not, as I read it, that Job simply should have trusted in God's benevolence despite whatever happened. Instead, I see the God's words functioning in a way similar to disasters; they force us to realize how puny our efforts are at understanding disasters and why they happen. For example, in response to the Auschwitz survivor, how can I insist that this person trust that God exists when the horrors they experienced during the Holocaust left them unable to still relate to a God? All I can do is agree with them that life is beyond our comprehension.

There is a wild card however, and here I find myself inclined to break with Caputo. I am completely unable to found my convictions in any evidence, but I remain convicted that God does exist and that this God is good. I take Job as a model of sorts; I stand before the chaos of life unable organize it and yet remain convicted that, as Julian of Norwich repeated, "all will be well." The point is that my current location is consecrated, instead of being the sorry situation I am unfortunately in, it is the natural, even desirable place of struggle from which I am able to most honestly engage with the world I find myself in.

I suppose when it comes down to it, that is where I stand, nothing is mission-critical except for the desire to engage with life with as much integrity as possible.