Shaken

As someone who has tried to follow the spiritual path for some time, I would like to dwell on the repercussions of a shaken earth on our Christian faith.

Two of the most significant earthquakes in Scripture are found in the Gospel. One happened, if memory serves, around the time our Lord Jesus Christ breathed his last.

“Father,” He said, “Into your hands I commend my Spirit.” There and then the curtain dividing the holy of holies from the rest of the Temple in Jerusalem was torn in two, graves were opened and ancient holy people, resurrected, walked about in the city.

The other Gospel quake I remember occurred just as the angel of the resurrection rolled away the stone at the entrance of Jesus’ tomb on the third day since his death. That quake froze the Roman guards posted at the tomb, and we believe, attended the rising of our Lord from the dead.

Amid the death and devastation (as of this writing more than 150 persons are recorded to have perished and at least 200 remain missing following the quake with damage pegged at more than P1 billion), I find it necessary to continue to seek the face of a compassionate God versus the swirling idea that the tremor and its aftershocks are a form of divine retribution for us wicked people.

I do not deny my wickedness and I do not defend it but neither do I attribute these earthquakes to God’s wrath. The Gospel tells me that the earth shook (1) to herald Jesus’ erasure of the divide between God and man and (2) to signal through Jesus’ resurrection that death is no longer man’s fate. I will not ascribe to the rage of God the flaws of the earth because for the record, his quakes brought life, not death and destruction, and He is a consistently merciful, not a vengeful Father.

Scripture tells us that creation groans to be set free. It is imperfect. We are not in Eden. That’s why we have earthquakes, storms and other natural disasters.

If the earthquake has prodded me to repent, as it has, that is to my shame because it shows that I in effect require special effects to beat my hard-heartedness. If the earthquake has prodded me to repent, as it has, then that is unfair to God because it shows that I have become so estranged from him that I conceive him to be a deity bent on pulling me to himself with violent cords. But if amid earth’s turmoil I do not listen to the still, small voice of God still calling to me, crying out in anguish for the victims and the fearful, distraught survivors, that is to my eternal shame. For each episode of grief in time has been grafted by the Father onto that Vine, that cruciform Tree of Life planted one Good Friday on the place of the skull. The mourning of bereaved Visayans constitutes a chorus with the prayer of the Messiah on Calvary: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

God was not in the Visayan earthquakes, just as He was not in the earthquake, wind or fire that besieged the prophet Elijah on the mountain. But in the tears of the grieving, the silence of those who perished, the fears of children, the hopes of the homeless and of parents and grandparents, the unsung kindness of rescuers and relief workers, He is there, speaking in a voice so small that we have to silence our self-preoccupied hearts to hear and reach out to him.