NB. Now I’m interested that you have used the word “loving” when you’ve brushed tangentially definitions earlier you said that some of the elements are “faithfulness, loving, love and intelligence”; you’ve just re-used the word loving in relationship to God there. I was looking at the world health organization figures, 123.4, that’s one two three point four million people in the world have contracted Covid. 2.7 million people have died. How can an all-loving God, who Christians also believe is all-powerful, allow human suffering on such a dreadful scale?

RW. No theoretical answer to this has ever really worked. That has to be said honestly right at the beginning, and for people right in the middle of suffering, you know, they don’t want theology; they don’t want theories. So how do we cope with it?

First of all, God has made a world in which all kinds of different streams and strands of causation are at work, different streams of cause and effect. How they all work, we don’t fully know. We’re not bad; we’re getting better at it all the time, as we become more attuned to the scientific structures around us. In such a world there are, you might say, inevitably going to be collisions:  people walk into things, literally or or metaphorically – circumstances arise which create conditions which, if human beings are in their path, can be fatal. You might say a great storm out in the middle of the pacific ocean might be neither here nor there; bring it a few hundred miles further east or west and you’ve have a Tsunami and a massive loss of life.

The question then is:  Do we imagine a God who is constantly stepping in to prevent disaster, a God who is always recalibrating the world that he’s made? And at what point is there a sort of cutoff where God says, “Well, that’s a bit too minor for me to adjust or to avoid.”

So I don’t know the answer but I I start there by thinking, “Well, God has made this kind of world and God, in what some people would call his humility, has stepped back to say, “This world has to work itself out according to its own rules and regularities.” But then the next thing is that God does not leave the world without his presence, without his action, but it’s an action that constantly comes through what he’s made, and part of that action coming really to the the business of tonight part of that action is our own prayer.

We are told that, if we try to open our hearts and minds to God, we are making ourselves a little bit of a channel for God to make a difference. And that’s why I think the answer to, if there is ever an answer to, this appalling question, is somewhere in that area. It also has something to do with us:  We are trying to make a path for God’s action to come into whatever circumstances we’re praying about, make a path into the heart of the tragedy and the terror that’s around us.

And we may not have a theory, but we have a calling.

REFLECT

When we see, hear or are in the midst of a tradegy, we often do so as a spectator, expecting that, God is the only one who has to “do” anything about it. We often tend to see our part as having empathy for the people involved in the tradegy and we are to be supportive in our thoughts and prayers and, if possible, via some token act of charity. But Archishop Williams is asking us the see these tragedies as personal callings:

• We are to “make ourselves a little bit of a channel for God to make a difference.”, and
• We have a part to play in the tradegy; it “has something to do with us:  We are to try to make a path for God’s action to come into whatever circumstances we’re praying about, make a path into the heart of the tragedy and the terror that’s around us.”

Think about the last or the current tragedy you experienced. What did you or could you have thought, prayed for and done to be “a little bit of a channel for God to make a difference”?

In this or the next tragedy, how is God calling me to “a part to play in the tradegy”? How can I and my family, friends, neighbors and parishioners make ourselves more aware of this tragedy being a calling for us to create “a path for God’s action to come into the circumstances, – a path into the heart of the tragedy and the terror that’s around us”?

Talk to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, about this.

Sister Loretta