Where is God in a Pandemic?
The Poems and Essays on this page represent my thoughts during the Coronavirus Pandemic. I think it is helpful to read the page in the order the assorted poems and essays are posted. However, the page includes indexed links for the reader’s convenience. The posts on this page are an ongoing response and will continue throughout the crisis.
Like a wind that settles and spins it all comes undone
A demon’s hoard of microscopic death
No one is safe
Where is God?
An apocalypse begins
Nero profits while our breath is consumed
Giants - tower building - demigods of idolatry and death
Holding the power to annihilate life
Unable to save their own
Where is God?
Has he left?
Can we bring him back?
If, with love, we wipe away the tears of our children will he be there?
If we abolish weaponry, threatening all life, will he return?
If we feed the poor instead of bankers, will he look to heal us?
If we turn from worshipping the symbols of impotent religion will we find him?
Can we save the world?
Can we bring God into the world?
Can we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with the crucified God?
He walks with the excluded, the poor, the broken, the victims, the ones forgotten by the Giants.
The absence of God was experienced by Jesus on the cross. The concept of God’s absence is taught throughout the scripture. When God watches and does not intervene, we experience God’s absence. Jesus goes with us through suffering and we are able to keep faith through horrendous events. We cry out “How long” because God is not acting to save, heal, or rescue us. The Coronavirus is death present in the created order. The world becomes more hostile to human life as our morality and ethical behavior descends into self-destruction. Our moral and ethical behavior is connected to the earth; so we experience a land in need of healing - God hears from heaven.
Jesus said the rain falls on the just and the unjust - Jesus attributes to God the goodness of blessing, of life giving rain, not the death that is in the world. In scripture, Death begins as judgment for violating God’s prohibition, it later becomes God’s enemy. He is the God of the living, of life - death is the absence of God.
When Christians say, "God was present" does this not indicate an awareness of God's absence? Doesn't the communion ceremony serve to remind us of Jesus’ absence? If we are to be like Jesus then we face the absence of God in the world and experience death not just as the end of life, but as the gnawing power of evil that disrupts the shalom of God in the earth.
We bring God into the world by being like Jesus. Acts of mercy, living justly in relation to God, humanity, and the creation, brings God into the world. God’s will is not done, because we shut God out of our affairs - God is absent. God’s absence is experienced by the just and the unjust.
Jesus is with us through the Spirit of Christ (Holy Spirit). If we walk in the Spirit, we bring God into the world; we are the broken body of Christ bearing the cross of God’s absence. Often, walking in the Spirit is a matter of faith over divine presence and empowerment. This is indicative of maturity on our journey of becoming, of being conformed to the image of God in Christ Jesus. Consider the communion ceremony where we are to remember Jesus and in particular his death (till he comes). Death, the enemy of God, reveals the absence of God.
Until God is 'all in all' we 'all' righteous and unrighteous, experience the absence of God.
We learn to be 'like Jesus' when God is not present; to be the children of God as aliens, exiles, strangers, as a people who stand when all hell contradicts our claims of God's goodness. Qohelet the Wiseman wrote,” ... then I saw all the work of God, that no one can find out what is happening under the sun. However much they may toil in seeking, they will not find it out; even though those who are wise claim to know, they cannot find it out.” (Ecclesiastes 8:17)
Qohelet is writing within the wisdom tradition and attests to the truth that our reality is subject to unexplainable injustices that are contrary to monotheistic faith in a God of goodness. I think, in particular, the problem of evil is subject to this statement of Qohelet’s. We wrestle with, ‘Where is God?’ in moments of evil that surpass any explanation.
Truthfully, Christians will suffer and die of the Coronavirus right alongside the deluded giants of our age. So, we use wisdom, we pray for mercy, we also love our way through the mess. Christian people should be examples through doing all we can to turn the tide of this virus. The church should be practicing social distancing, serving the elderly with food and pharmacy deliveries, searching for ways to provide supplies and resources for health care workers, and displaying a faith that walks through the valley of the shadow of death, knowing death does not get the final word on our existence.
Death insists that life is real, and during a pandemic, our mortality as creatures insists that
we are all the same – human.
The presence of death is creation’s voice rising in the absence of God.
Out of the ground we arose as God spoke.
Somewhere between heaven and earth, humanity began.
We are connected to the earth and long for the voice of the one who said rise and walk.
Creation travails under the weight of humanity’s immorality,
humanity’s abuse of all that God has made.
To repent is to forgive, to forgive is to restore,
to create is to be merciful in a world where mercy is thought to be a weakness.
We have forgotten that the earth is the Lord’s
and thought we could parcel it out as though we were gods,
take from the earth without care for life,
but creation speaks, and her voice rages in force like a courageous mother defending her children from monsters who consume goodness.
We are all her children.
We are all God’s children.
Voices, all professing to know
To whom do we give our ears?
Lengthy diatribes suit the angry
Positivity without light suit the spiritually blind
A smile without tears is dishonest
At what cost is spiritual intelligence gained?
Is the one who quivers in emotion the voice of God?
Is the academic able to reconcile reality with their theology?
I will look to the broken, the scarred,
the one familiar with suffering
the one who walks alone with God
shunned by the crowd
Show me the scars of a life that has faced trials
Lift up the voice of the survivor for whom trauma filters every word
Hear the voice of those for whom pain is always near
For whom sorrow is a constant presence
Shun the voice of the proud, the powerful
- of those who have forgotten the poor
- of those whose god never suffers
Seek the wisdom that looks reality in the eye
even when God cannot be found
Give ear to the one who listens through suffering
who speaks with fear
lives in faith
and shows God to others when God cannot be found
Hopelessness in relation to encroaching powers that bring death is an honest emotion. Some people attempt to escape this emotion through denial. Denial manifests in several ways; in apocalyptic fervor, through demonic surrender (which anticipates the worse with a sense of pleasure), or a misguided faith that does not face reality.
It is human to vacillate from hopelessness to hope, from despair to faith. Speaking honestly from our souls liberates us to capture a vision for a better day; even if we do not know that we will be there.
Hope is the power of the imagination set aflame with Love and functioning relationally with Faith in a flowing synthesis of goodness ever conceiving of how the mess of life, of reality, might be healed.
Hope should be understood to be more than mere wishful thinking. Hope calls for action on our part to initiate movements that open a path for our Hope to enter the world. I suggest we all begin with turning from our efforts at self-justification and acknowledge our brokenness (repentance), followed by action that includes speech, doing acts of kindness toward other persons, and forgiving.
Hope’s conscience is Love speaking loudly in every circumstance. Hope is indomitable it can never be silenced for it is thinking like God thinks. All things work for good because hope birthed into the world is heard by God. Hope loves with a smile amidst tears and brings strength for each day.
God’s hope is for us to listen to the voice of our present reality and call upon God to enter it, for then we will hear the voice of God. It is our time, our moment, to do all that will bring God into the world.
A pandemic touches all of humanity without regard for status, ethnicity, or religious beliefs. Reasoned, compassionate voices, should rise to places of influence.
Christian faith in the U.S. has been shamed by those who display an ignorance of reality, history, and theology, they have chosen the gods of economic rape, militaristic genocide, and xenophobia.
We need the spiritually mature whose lives and voices display an intelligence and grace for facing the human condition to show us God. Such souls do not need to quote religious texts to justify their speech. This is so because they speak with a grace and wisdom born from their study and their spirituality; their authority is drawn from God’s approval for their words and manner of living.
Such voices are recognized by the pure in heart, and it is God who lifts them up to be heard or rejected. These souls sit in contrast to the powerlessness of those who rule over humanity with institutional (governmental) authority to address a pandemic (plague). We all need to hear voices that speak for God during a time of duress and death.
We need to look to our elders. We live in an era when our greatest treasures have been pushed aside as though their lives are now obsolete. There are souls who walk in our midst, men and women who have quietly lived lives that reflect Christ. These souls did not stop learning, they have studied, thought, read, lived, traveled, witnessed history, and suffered loss along the way. They respect the education of others and recognize greatness as a life approved of God even if lived in obscurity.
The broken body of Christ speaks from a place of suffering and calls all of us to stretch out our arms to forgive and embrace all of humanity, to search our souls and remember our mortality is God speaking. Humility will mark the speech and actions of any person who receives their mortality as God speaking. Hope and surrender will dwell simultaneously in a soul who accepts their mortality as God speaking. The promise of life rises anew after the plague. The loss, the trauma, the memory, corrects our path if we hear God when our mortality speaks.
They have forgotten that the earth is the Lord's, as are all people of every nation.
They have forgotten that obedience is better than their sacralizing of ceremonies.
They have forgotten to teach peace to their children but have let violence be exalted and replaced the sword of truth with blood.
They have forgotten to tend the garden of life and have let the poison mouth of vipers claim they speak for God.
They have forgotten to love their neighbor for how can one love God who they have not seen when they do not love their neighbor whom they see; one who bears the image of God.
They have forgotten the Lord of all and thought they alone knew the Holy One.
It is time to remember the one who calls little children to himself, forgives freely, and lives in living souls, not cathedrals.
It is time to remember our mortality for only then can we hear the voice that calls us to be more than consumers.
It is time to be a people whose God is the Lord.
The death toll rises
Incompetence and madness
all bundled up in a human deity’s currency
Evil rises
Human beings become a herd without a pasture
The spirit of the fuhrer in a red hat
The dream rose to be twisted into a nightmare
Militarized police oppress the dispossessed
The corporate beast profits like a seven-headed dragon
The poor linger to die in cages that contain death’s breath
while those with the sign of the deity profit
The decorations of heroes is become fluff on the chest of the useless
Ships of war and leisure testify to the madness
unable to escape death’s breath
or the deity’s unquenchable thirst for power
There is no Bonhoeffer to resist
Herod runs a university and scurries to hold on to power
Perilous times
Fools teach faith as love for war, the state, and money
Who will impale the beast, the dragon,
whose name is emblazoned in the clouds?
Our father’s killed the prophets
I think I’ll just breathe for awhile
lose the tension of the moment
in the smile of being with her
I think I’ll just cry and laugh at the same time
I’ll be thankful for those who love me
as we live through this uncertain moment
My intent is to live through the darkness
that has fallen, if not, then I know
we cannot perish in the one who holds us all
We cannot be lost
All that I am God knows and will not lose
So, I’ll just breathe for awhile
lose the tension of the moment
for this moment is mine
I’ll sing a song, dance, and sleep tonight
with my prayers for a better world
tomorrow I’ll breathe for awhile
