Where is the Love? Posted in: Suffering and an all-powerful benevolent God
Haiti Earthquake, Jan 12th 2010 – if God loves us, and is in control … how can one reconcile that idea with the horror and tragedy of such a huge scale natural disaster?
OK … everyone still has an individual experience of death/loss of loved ones, as in the normal course of life. And perhaps those who lose their life are not particularly aware that they are dying as part of a mass loss of life. And those who remain are primarily affected by the loss of their immediate loved ones. But still there is something about large scale natural disasters that I find particularly challenging to my conviction that God loves us and is in control.
Some might say it is collective karma … that a socially shared activity in a past life is now bringing perpetrators together and bearing fruit. There something about such a suggestion that is completely abhorrent to me. And anyway, for me, karma-as-an-idea seems too much of the God-and-us-being-different/separate ilk … with God on one side being some sort of punisher/wielder of justice, and us on the other side being the sinners. I prefer the notion that God is the all-powerful one who loves us unconditionally, and that we are also all God at the same time (at least in the sense of our simultaneous oneness and difference).
I don’t believe that for us to ask the question “where is the love?” is to invite being smited from above. And I guess faith means believing something to be true, in spite of not being able to answer the question, or explain situations like the Haiti Earthquake in terms of God’s love.