When bad weather happens to good people.

What is God doing when thousands perish in earthquakes and hurricanes, floods and famines?

Near the end of the Prayers of the Faithful one Sunday morning, I heard this plea: For the thousands who drowned in the Asian typhoon last night. We pray to the Lord." Everyone dutifully prayed to the Lord, and the prayer became a gnawing puzzle for me. What on earth is going on here? What's the Lord going to do for those who died in the typhoon that hasn't already been done? Presumably God already knows about it. Presumably God caused it, or allowed it, or at least witnessed it. Or perhaps, in ways that surpass all human understanding, huge numbers of human deaths in natural calamities may somehow be good in the mind of God. It just appears to be a disaster to our limited minds and hearts; so just quit asking stupid questions and trust God.

But since Saint Augustine once praised "faith seeking understanding," I asked some fellow Christians, even some who are paid to know, what place God plays in natural disasters.

* What do you, as a believing, praying Christian, think God is doing during tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and famines that kill thousands of people through no apparent human cause?

* If you pray for the victims, what's the nature of the prayer?

* Could God have prevented the calamity? If so, why did God not prevent it?

* If God could not have prevented it, what's the nature of prayers of petition?

These are not two-bit questions. Take the country of Bangladesh, for instance. As recently as 1991, a cyclone killed 125,000 people there; back in 1970, a worse cyclone killed 250,000 people in the same country.

How can I even think of 250,000 people? Well, how about 1,000 packed airplanes all crashing on the same day--20 planes going down in each state of the union?

Again, how does God fit into any of this?

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard wrestles with this problem for a whole wonderful book, For the Time Being (Vintage). Although she never really settles the big questions, she does help put them into context. "Every year, 60 million people die; of these, half are children under 5. Every 110 hours a million more humans arrive on the planet than die into the planet."

So it took God only about a day to replace the 250,000 Bangladesh cyclone victims in 1970. Is God, then, some sort of easy-come, easy-go population manager, almost whimsically zapping thousands at once and simultaneously birthing substitutes to fill their places?

Ground zero

Maybe people at the scene of such disasters have some clues. But when I ask a few, I get mixed replies.

Martin Lueders, a photojournalist of much grief and travail, has come to embrace the View of playwright Spaulding Grey, who believes there's an evil cloud that travels around the planet, working its evil ways.

Lueders doesn't personally believe God controls the weather or human atrocities upon fellow humans. He just photographs the unexplainable sorrow and sadness.

Fellow photojournalist Hector Emanuel, who works with the Red Cross to document disasters, thinks all of this can be attributed to random occurrences of nature. He doesn't pray for the victims or believe in God. In the aftermath of disasters, however, he often hears the survivors crying out, "Thank you, God" or "Thank you, Virgin." Emanuel respects that in people and thinks they're better off for it as believers. But he, personally, stays detached.

Douglas Ryan, Catholic Relief Services' country representative for Honduras, speaks quietly of the way Hurricane Mitch challenged and matured his prayer life. The October 1998 hurricane wiped out 10,000 Hondurans when it ravaged that small country. When you're pulling kids and the elderly out of the mud, says Ryan, "the gospel message takes flesh--the sheer physical expression of recognizing Christ in the poor.

"When I wonder why this happened, I look to Chapter 4 of Ephesians, where the grace of God can help turn something that on the surface destroys and purges into a sign of cleansing and renewal. What we are all about is giving hope to people.

"Yes, we have moments of doubt," maintains Ryan. "Everyone thought this storm had missed us and was heading toward Mexico, and then it turned and smacked us head-on. Regrettably, some groups have come to the country and told the poor this happened because of their sins, and that they have not accepted Christ into their hearts. I find that distasteful, condescending, and judgmental in the worst sense of the word."

Dishing out disaster

Some people, struggling with the questions at a distance, cite Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, where the people who die in a bridge collapse are each shown to have reached a time and place where they are ready to return to the love of God.

Margaret Mantle, a poet, likes the Wilder approach. The God she often sees portrayed around her is an "inscrutable God, wasteful beyond imagination, wiping thousands of people off the face of the earth, like crumbs off a kitchen table." For Mantle, Wilder's perspective gives meaning to human destiny.

Others say they have to work to maintain their faith in a loving, merciful God.

Michael O'Loughlin, an editor, struggles to keep from falling into the trap of picturing God as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein--"a creator who sometimes unwittingly sets things into motion, then can't control them."

In her book, Dillard surveys history, searching for the answers to God's part in all of this. She paints an oft-repeated picture of God as one who sits on his throne and "dishes out human fates, in the form of cancer or cash" to 6 billion people. She surveys philosophers and theologians to try to counter the concept of a tyrant God. History doesn't help her much.

Many modern Christians, on the other hand, credit God with frequent and grateful interventions in their everyday lives. If you watch even a little TV, you can see folks praising God for their winning the lottery, for beating cancer, and, yes, for winning the Super Bowl.

Often without knowing why or how, Christians continue to thank God for deliverance from fatal earthly evils and for delivery of earthly goods--health, wealth, and victory in sporting events.

Some are convinced that God most assuredly gets involved in human affairs.

Carrie Fearn, a writer, says God can intervene, but "often he doesn't. Losing your life isn't the worst thing that can happen to you. Losing your soul--like the first grader who turned into a ruthless killer--is much worse. God may forgive that boy, but who can forgive the parents and the society who made him what he is?"

For some, there simply are no answers.

"No answers!" So concludes George Berdes, a retired professor, after pondering these questions of understanding for a week: "That may seem like a cop-out, but that's what faith is ultimately all about. Acceptance is not passive. Trust is not betrayal. Hope is not denial. Seeking but not finding perfectly is not failure."

Berdes also cites Pilgrim Souls: A Collection of Spiritual Autobiographies (Simon & Schuster), especially Emily Dickinson: "The unknown is the largest need of the intellect, though for it, no one thinks to thank God"; and Madeleine L'Engle: "Admit that it was a mystery, and stop giving me explanations."

Acts of God? No way

Sister Sheryl Chen, O.C.S.O., a former U.S. CATHOLIC editor, is a contemplative nun who prays for a living. Chen says contemplatives "pipe up at Prayers of the Faithful, too, with the latest disaster." They strive to be one with all creation without asking why. "It's like seeing a woven rug from the reverse side. We know in faith that the rug is beautiful, but we can't see all parts of the rug or how they work together."

Contemplatives "do not call natural disasters `acts of God,' as if God were some inept director with a masochistic bent." Their prayers are prayers of compassion, to suffer along with those who are suffering.

Why are they suffering in the first place? Does God ever intend or inflict pain?

"No, no, no," cries Father Richard Fragomeni, a professor of liturgy at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. "I totally disavow the concept of a God who inflicts pain." For Fragomeni that turns everything upside down. "The Crucifixion of Christ is the dearest image, the dearest icon, we have of God. It is not a God who inflicts pain and suffering, but a God who freely accepts inhabiting within it, so that within it we may be free. God embraces pain with us."

OK, so maybe God doesn't cause the pain. But doesn't God at least allow the pain and suffering?

"I don't think so," says Mary Deeley, professor of Hebrew scripture at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. "I don't think God is `doing' anything other than letting a limited (imperfect) system work itself out. To ask if God could have prevented the calamity is like asking if God could keep us from sinning. Theoretically, yes, but how does that honor the integrity of creation?"

So God could have but didn't halt the hurricane. Isn't that still a bit whimsical?

Not for Father Robert Barron of Mundelein Seminary in gundelein, Illinois. "If the Book of Job is right, then our attitude in the presence of seemingly meaningless suffering must be one of awe-filled trust," says Barron. We are not God, and we don't see with the "depth and breadth of God's vision."

So we're somewhat back to square one: Stop asking questions and just trust God.

Prayerful surrender

What are the inner workings of such blind trust? Do I just try to deny or ignore the pain and suffering I see all around me?

This may not satisfy the intellectuals or nonbelievers, but the only Christian answer that makes sense for day-to-day living is prayer--mumbling, bumbling, everyday prayer.

Back to Dillard, with whom we began.

Near the end of For the Time Being, she cites theologian Paul Tillich, who in his three-volume systematic theology devoted only two paragraphs to prayer.

Dillard recasts and all but embraces Tillich's insights on prayer:

   To entreat and to intercede is to transform situations powerfully. God
   participates in bad conditions here by including them in his being and
   ultimately overcoming them. True prayer surrenders to God; that willing
   surrender itself changes the situation a jot or two by adding power which
   God can use. Since God works in and through existing conditions, I take
   this to mean that when the situation is close, when your friend might die
   or might live, then your prayer's surrender can add enough power--mechanism
   unknown--to tilt the balance.

But Dillard recognizes limits. "Though it won't still earthquakes or halt troops, it might quiet cancer or quell pneumonia. For Tillich, God's activity is by no means interference, but instead divine creativity--the ongoing creation of life with all its greatness and danger."

This makes as much sense to me as anything I found.

For me, the Tillich insight about divine cooperation is money in a praying Christian's bank. But sometimes, when one seeks prayerfully for answers, the questions don't get answered--at least in the way they are asked.

Chen has her two-sided carpet. Barron, in turn, calls up the Saint Thomas Aquinas image ora painting upon which God is working. We often view the painting with our "nose pressed against the canvas. The perspective is so short and narrow that the `meaning' of the painting never emerges." Only when we back away does it make sense. "And only God sees the whole painting."

If I stand back far enough, I may begin to see the big picture. And I'll once more be able to pray faithfully for victims of hurricanes or tornadoes on Sunday mornings. My attempts at mastery have yielded to comforting mystery.

It's all wrapped up in an anonymous prayer a friend gave me last year:

   May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and
   superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.

   And may God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain,
   rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to
   comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.