They say God has moments of anger. Wayward children and evildoers make him quite irate.
Where does God take his wrath? Frogs or fire perhaps. But if God went on a malevolent seismic rant, then an earthquake where three of Haiti’s nine million poor live would be the perfect spot in the western hemisphere to maximize suffering.
Malignant design from intelligent design. As Haitian journalist Pooja Bhatia wrote in the wake of the great shake, “If God exists, he’s really got it in for Haiti.”
Some indeed see God as the shaker. Bhatia writes, “Zed, a housekeeper in my apartment complex, said God was angry at sinners around the world, but especially in Haiti. Zed said the quake had fortified her faith, and that she understood it as divine retribution.”
Evangelist Pat Robertson would agree. Drawing on a noxious theodicy, he defended Haiti’s calamity as a blessing in disguise because help will come to rebuild. But he added that Haitians had it coming to them since they swore a pact to the devil.
“They said ‘we will serve you if you will get us free from the French’ ... so the Devil said ‘O.K., it’s a deal.’ and they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got themselves free but ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, while not in the same league as Robertson, wrote in a letter to Christopher Hoppeer in the wake of the Lisbon earthquake, “There is no divine visitation which is likely to have so general an influence upon sinners as an earthquake.”
Others, however, see God not as the shaker but the shaken.
In the early 1980’s I was invited to serve as Director of Communications for a Relief and Development organization. On many trips to Haiti I met wonderful Christians who had all but given their lives to a people who hadn’t been able to catch a break.
Their hearts were broken and drawn to a country with a long history of repression, corruption and exploitation. Jobs were few. The soil unable to bear much fruit. Authority waffling between dictatorship and anarchy.
But certain souls came and stayed.
Ben Loyer, a construction worker from Sarnia, Ont., along with his wife Gloria, lived in the north of Haiti for over 23 years raising their four children while training and equipping locals in basic husbandry.
When she came to Haiti in 1943, Sister Joan Margaret of the Episcopal Society of St. Margaret was dismayed that children who were blind, deaf, speech impaired or physically handicapped were simply ignored or hidden.
Beginning with five students under a tree, Sister Joan founded St. Vincent’s School in 1945.
Over the years it grew to become a multi-service facility to provide education, vocational training, physical therapy and medical care for common orthopedic problems including scoliosis, polio, cerebral palsy, rickets and Pott’s Disease (spinal tuberculosis).
Corrective procedures were done by volunteer Haitian physicians. Medical teams from the United States and Canada added their expertise in dentistry, ophthalmology and audiology.
St.Vincent’s was destroyed in the recent earthquake. While most of the children and staff survived, at least six deaths have been reported.
But somewhere in the corner of the school’s open courtyard, buried under the rubble, is a sign which has from the time I first read it continued to trouble me.
It suggests that in the great mystery of Job-like suffering which inspires arguments with and about God, there remains the notion for people of faith — that though it may seem that God has it in for Haiti, they can in fact find him there, incarnate and buried in the rubble.
The sign at St. Vincent’s read: “Jesus looks exactly like the person who needs me.”
Bob Ripley is a syndicated religion columnist and a retired pastor.