One of our day trips off the Mercy Ship last March was to an infant orphanage or crèche run by a government agency. The children were infants up to preschool toddlers. The infants are often malnourished and abused or profoundly neglected by their parents.
At the crèche they are fed, kept clean and given medical attention, but the staff is small and there is little time for cuddling. Volunteers from the ship go there a couple times a week just to pick them up and love on them for a few hours.
The crèche is a hacienda style building with rooms built around an open plaza of sand with some worn playground equipment. It is very hot and very humid. I picked up Bernage from his crib. He was a 3-yearold boy with skin that seemed as dry and thin as paper with little flesh on his bones. His hands and arms were held up in a perpetual gesture of surrender. His life experience up to this point had taught him to withdraw into himself like a homeless person hiding out in a refrigerator box… no real protection from anything but hoping to avoid notice.
I held him. I spoke quietly to him. I prayed that God would give him the courage to come out one day and on that day, he would meet with more love than he started with. Then I whispered an apology on behalf of the human race for the rotten welcome we had given him. I wish such stories were rare.
The “problem of evil” is a thorny theological debate. Many people are convinced that it indicts God as being either unloving or impotent. But I haven’t heard any good explanations for what exactly God is supposed to do about evil.
Presumably a powerful loving God would wipe out evil. This sounds simple. A spiritual “shock and awe” strike: Father, Son and Holy Schwarzkopf.
But who or what gets struck? Bernage’s parents? Bam. Educators and parents who fail to impress upon young people the importance of social responsibility? Thud. The coalition of politicians and corporate suits who suck countries dry returning only economic dribblings to its people, making it exceedingly difficult to care for their children? Kaboom. Maybe it would be easier to list those who wouldn’t be stealth struck by justice.
I am thinking God would be about as successful at eradicating evil and establishing peace in this way as we have with our foreign policy in Iraq.
Perhaps we should remove God and the afterlife and teach people to live more heroically and responsibly in the here and now. It has been tried. The regimes of Soviet and Maoist totalitarianism all but removed religion and spirituality from society for much of the last century. How would this have helped Bernage? Not much.
Soviet orphanages were something out of a Dickens novel. Being a boy, he might have fared better in China whose export-forprofit of unwanted infant girls over the last 20 years has hardly left a moral high water mark for humanity to affirm. Renouncing spirituality and God didn’t seem to reduce evil.
Still, I agree with the atheists on one score. When it comes to reasons for the existence of evil, it is productive to leave God out of the equation. He is immaterial. How we got to this point… how kids like Bernage got such a raw deal is all on us. Complaints about God are diversionary.
I meet all kinds of people who come to Grand Marais for “a fresh start.” Many are running from something. The trouble is that there are no fresh starts because they all bring themselves everywhere we go. I’m not saying that fresh starts are impossible. It’s just that changing the scenery, whether it is geographic, political, educational or economic scenery, won’t change us. We need a change inside.
God is not necessary to explain the current condition we humans have made for ourselves. However, in a discussion regarding how we might generate a fresh start from the inside out, God becomes a great deal more important. Certainly it would be a mistake to trivialize human accountability or peddle sentimentality as spirituality. But it is not sentimentality that keeps Bernage stuck in my head.
The world needs to be changed. Hugging babies who have no one; giving money to charities; voting my conscience… all good. All a start. All inadequate.
Each of us has to choose how to live hopefully in a world with way too many kids who are discarded as well as many other injustices. For my part, I will live in faith, trusting God to change my attitudes, challenge my choices, and multiply any act of love I have the sense to commit. Would love to have your company!
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. For June, our contributor is Pastor Dave Harvey, who has served as pastor of Grand Marais Evangelical Free Church since February of 2008.
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