Seeking solace from fear, sorrow

KENNETT, Mo. -- A great many of us, it seems, are in need of a power that seems greater than our own capacity to provide. Since Sept. 11, I have phoned or been called by friends from New York City to the West Coast, each wanting to discuss the horrible events that occurred so swiftly and so unexpectedly on an otherwise beautiful morning in September.

Each one I talked to asked the same questions or pondered the identical mystery: Why did it happen to us? Is this to become more than an apparition? Does God really care for America? Why did the just have to die among the unjust?

Our disturbing questions have been prevalent throughout virtually every strata of American society. In New York, one of the nation's most brilliant reporters visited his boss's office following the bombings and announced he was leaving. No, he had no plans for the future. No, he wasn't going to the Washington Post. He was just quitting.

Mental-health professionals reveal their patients have dwelt at troubling length on the terrorist attacks, worried their old fears were somehow not great enough and now require expanding to cover threats by unknown, unseen terrorists.

Young children, watching the death and destruction before their eyes, have gazed silently and terrified by strange, bizarre events that monopolized the same TV screens that earlier brought them delight.

A survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor confides feelings resembling those he experimented the next day as he lay seriously wounded in a Navy hospital, contemplating his chances for living through the next 24 hours.

It is safe to say that all of these emotions have a common denominator: a troubling, soul-piercing questions about God. The questions weren't asking who is God. They were asking: Is God?

For some among us, the awful burden of disbelief becomes intolerable, hence the fear so many have experienced for the first time in their lives, or the first time in a long, long time.

The absurdity of a world without explanation often proves to be too much to live with. Our intellects push us to find a rationale, an explanation, an excuse, anything to take the place of despair, something larger than ourselves to believe in and to trust once again.

If the answer cannot be compelled by our intellect, we plead for an answer that, at least, we can choose to believe without contradicting that intellect. It has to be more than just a God of prohibition. More than just a God of guilt and punishment. It has to be more than John Calvin's chilling conclusion that God loves Jacob but hates Esau. More than Robert Browning's cold and capricious Caliban.

It must be a God like the one that was promised in the ancient books: a God of mercy, a God of peace, a God of hope. In the end, to make any sense, it must a God of love.

Many of us need so much to believe in God that we are in danger -- as suggested by the old sinner that Ivan described in "The Brothers Karamazov" -- of making one up. But we don't have to. We simply have to be taught.

Faith is not a call to escape the world, but to embrace it. Creation is not an elaborate testing ground, but an invitation to join in the work of restoration. God created the world, but he did not finish it. He left that to us. What an extraordinary reaffirmation this is, of both our optimism and our mature faith.

Think of it this way: God left it to us to finish the work of creation. Something larger than ourselves to believe in. A whole world to work on. There are other places to work on improving the world than in politics and government. We can start by finishing it in our own lives, then among those closest to us, and finally to strangers we have never known.

So, this leaves the question: Who is God? He is a voice urging us to be involved in actively working to improve the world he created -- in every way possible, and regardless of our chosen profession, our church affiliation, our status as a citizen. Because it is a world he loves so much that he made us so we could enjoy it.

This belief in benevolent activism -- in the commitment of each to the welfare of all, especially to the least among us -- is in danger of being relegated to the volumes of lost causes and discarded concepts. We have lost these beliefs because we were too busily engaged in building our own worlds, our own environments, our own treasures that we forgot any obligation we might feel to advance God's wishes.

Think back to the headlines that mirrored our lives before Sept. 11. We were concentrating on the performance of a new president, the strayed morals of a lone congressman, the uncertainty of a stock market that defied both reason and expectation, the civil wars that matched one group of humans against other humans, the ravages mankind perpetrates on God's planet, and the vicarious thrills of satisfying our own basic desires regardless of how inappropriate or immoral.

Believing that we have an obligation to love is not a comfortable position to be in. It can haunt us. It can nag us in moments of happiness and personal success, disturbing sleep and giving us a sense of guilt and unworthiness that used to be so strong and that the modern age is so eager to deny.

It is not easy believing that God commits us to the endless task of seeking improvement of the world around us, knowing that fulfillment is an eternity away. But better than the anguish of futility. Better than the emptiness of despair. And capable of bringing meaning to our most modest and clumsy efforts. A useful consolation for all of us.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.