OK. I think Pat Robertson has found the true reason for our financial crash. God is French. He said Haiti got slammed by an earthquake because they tossed out the French in the 18th century in a slave revolt. Less than a decade ago the U.S. was seized by paroxysms of anti-French fever. Congress renamed potatoes freedom fries and chef’s poured French wine down the drain (sigh!). It was vogue to trash-talk France. Now the financial crash. Best explanation of it so far, given all the spin and obfuscation from Wall Street.
If it’s true God is French, atheists might want to reconsider. I like the idea that good fashion and excellent wine are divine. And when I visit Paris, I feel closer to subtle, seductive, ephemeral powers. And, of course, there are Angers, Chartres, Celigny sur Ozerain (where Chocolat was filmed), and the Provence, just to mention a few sublime French places.
I realize that the Robertson-Limbaugh cabal said abominable things yesterday about the horrors in Haiti. If I couldn’t find a way to ridicule them, I think I’d just have to shoot them and put them out of their stupid, hateful, heartbreaking misery. But I claim to be a Christian, so ridicule is as far as I can go.
Unfortunately, a lot of people still believe in a God who controls everything and uses natural disasters to punish people. The less offensive, but still problematic version of this kind of thinking is the idea that tragedies happen for a reason, to teach us something. I’ve heard people who lost their children or had some other horrible thing happen to them say “this must be happening for a reason. God must be trying to teach me something.” It’s an odd kind of narcissism, this idea that your life is so important that God would use and harm those you love just to communicate with you.
This coming weekend, a lot of clergy will face having to say something about what happened in Haiti. I hope they talk about love and about how we weep and worry and hope and put our few dollars on an online form or in an envelope because, somewhere, deep inside us lives this thing, this ability to see another person in anguish and not turn away. In the dusty, bloody, weeping, anguished black faces of this continent’s poorest people, we see something of ourselves and want to help. We see those faces and their numb grief and suffering, and see God. We feel deep in us a welling up and spilling over of compassion, making us want to do something, anything to hold on to that deep humanity that binds us to each other and to something sacred we sense in ourselves and others.
That is all of God I need, that moment when so many of us feel tears leap to our eyes beyond our control and help because we cannot stand to do nothing. Love and its vulnerabilities and joys have always had the quality of something sacred for me, a gift I have not earned, a grace that comes with being human. I find it enough to love beauty, to seek justice and compassion, and to be among those I love. Though I think I might enjoy visiting France again sometime.