Understanding elephants

Anyone living in this country at this time who decides to write about what has happened and is continuing to happen in Christchurch would need to be particularly careful if he intended to make specifically religious observations about the situation.

And yet I cannot see how a Christian could possibly avoid making such observations - if only under his breath in the privacy of his own room. (Or the privacy of his own blog.)

The earthquake in Christchurch is what it is to all of us because it has brought suffering and death. Of course, it has also occasioned the bravery and selflessness of many, and I have no doubt that voices (Christian and otherwise) will be raised in their praise. But that won't be enough to make sense of it all. The elephants of suffering and death will still be in the room.

Very often religion is seen as a form of magic, as a supernatural (and therefore increasingly ineffectual) insurance policy. When there was so little knowledge of the natural world, and even less chance of controlling it, relying on prayers and holy relics to prevent earthquakes was as good a policy as any.

But not now. Which leaves us without a policy at all. And without an explanation. But at least Christianity has had one of those. Earthquakes are visited on hapless sinners by the divine wrath - that's why they happen, and indeed that's why they should happen. Except that they seem a bit morally haphazard (to put it mildly) and the whole business co-exists rather awkwardly with an infinitely kind and loving God.

However, I am relieved to tell you that Christianity has a rather better explanation for elephants than the above, and it concerns us rather than God. I would put it like this. Death is the reason for life. We are born so that we can die. In the earliest strata of the bible I doubt that that is so. There, we are born so that we might live, so that we might be happy, prosperous and well respected, and see our children's children in the midst of a grateful and admiring community. After that there are only the shadows of sheol.

But not in Christianity. Here life is a 'vale of tears,' here we long to depart and be with Christ, here we know that our treasure is in heaven, not on earth.

Except that we don't. There is a story by H. G. Wells (I think) in which a rather grand archbishop ends his bedtime prayers each night by telling the Lord to come and take him to Himself. The archbishop's valet finds his master one morning stiff and cold beside his bed, with a look of indescribable horror on his well-bred features. His prayer had been answered.

It seems to me not just that we are a bit vague about God, but that we have also tended to overlook the true nature of human beings, made in the image of God, who simply cannot cease to exist as conscious persons, even if they wanted to. Death is only the means by which we enter more fully into life. In some ways, this is risky. We need to prepare for it as we would prepare for any great change in our existence and experience. But in the sense in which we commonly mean it, we cannot die - we are just not made that way. And that is an integral and essential part of the Christian faith without which Christianity is no longer Christian.

As for the other elephant, we have overlooked at least one of the most important characteristics of the Christian understanding of God. Put simply, in us He suffers. He demonstrated this fairly conclusively on His Cross some two thousand years ago. This implies (to me at least) that suffering is not meaningless. If God is prepared to share in it, it must have extraordinary worth - even if that worth is largely concealed from us at the present time. But it won't be so for ever. Beyond the grave we shall know as we are known.

I recognise entirely that all this is not the sort of thing you can just shove down the throats of those who are so terribly caught up in suffering and death at the present time. In such circumstances it would sound merely glib and self-serving. But I do believe we should proclaim it clearly in the good times so that it can bring meaning and strength in the bad times, when there are too many elephants in the room.