The God Wound

Today, the sound of howling winds too often heard in these parts tears through the glass windows sealed for comfort.  Incorrigible. The deaths of 10,000 or so in one island during the last supertyphoon of this magnitude are still fresh in the collective memory of those in the 7,000 islands of this country who were spared. The winds don't lash or buffet, they crush any sliver of faith that God will spare us from danger. At least for me.

How does one heal from a God wound?

A year has barely passed after Typhoon Haiyan, today we get Typhoon Ruby. At this time, although it has made landfall, the news we get is that our luck can be summed in the few lives snuffed this time. Barely a handful this time.  

But I sorely remember how 2 days after Haiyan hit, after we all prayed in our heart of hearts and our deepest faith to our God, that the damage caused by the typhoon was zero. Somehow, it magically disappeared. And this to my mind was how the nuns in my Catholic high school described one typhoon that magically split into weaker forces getting lost in a mountain range.  How it was a miracle, nothing is impossible with God.

Tomorrow, I will still be expected to work. I will be talking to a Palestinian who has never experienced a typhoon in his life.  I told him to expect floods and strong winds but he will be safe because he lives in a good hotel. We talked about Haiyan and I could see his empathy. I'm quite certain a person who has no nation and no passport, hassled for his strange travel documents, can empathize with helplessness.

In the few days I've with met him we've talked about the Quran, about Israel, and my views on the beauty of dark-skinned people. He has been amazed at learning about the literacy rate in the Philippines, which is one of the highest in the world, our achievements at gender equality, and our propensity to adopt the less fortunate as our own.  He asked me, "Is adoption something you do morally?"  I said, "It's more cultural. My aunt has adopted six, and I have an adopted brother." No one will be able to tell. My colleague chimed in, "I myself have an adopted sister."

With all the corruption that has plagued this country, and with all our rebellions against our captors and bad leaders, you would imagine our God is not the God of obedience or compliance. And surely you may understand why.  Last super typhoon, it was the first time we ever experienced a thing called a storm surge. It was a cross between hurricane and tsunami.  We thought we had complied enough with our safety standards and the rest will be up to a rather merciful God, in our view. But the sea outdid itself and swept inland with the huge ships at harbor.  

We eventually learned after 2 days that the reason we thought Haiyan miraculously dissipated was because it had wiped out most of the coast guard and the police force and locked in the whole town, both dead and alive. Instant news blackout.  It wasn't a miracle. It was the end of the world for at least 40 days.  For about 40 days the town ate mostly the feast-worthy dish it's known for, roasted pork.  Among the dead they feasted, there were barely any alternatives.  After 40 days, help reached them after hurdling rotting corpses, logs, concrete slabs, and parts of wooden homes.

Today, right now, we hear minimal casualties.  I wait. It's past midnight and I won't be able to sleep. And what do I pray for that seems doable or reasonable to our God?  Compliance hardly saves us in this nation that is hard to rule over. Whatever semblance of stability we try for ultimately gets challenged by powers of nature or powers-that-be. Does God honor our efforts to suffer one another? When we barter our personal space for the accommodation of another, does God not see how little we feel?

I only pray that as minister, I have something to say next Sunday to the congregation I serve, when all the numbers are in and we all feel once again that nagging doubt. That I tell them that the wound of disappointment is where the light enters, as Rumi said.  That a Muslim is who I turn to for inspiration at this time. That I open the wound to a different care.  That I am feeling small because I am. Because power does not lie in invincibility but in resilience, not in domination but in steadfastness.  That it is not certainty around which the order of God is built, not in control, but in adaptability like forgiveness and love that adapts to the loved without losing yourself.   

And in the core of doubt is the ability to accept the relativity of certainty as well as of failure, of loss, of change. To doubt God is the coward's way of doubting if certainty and control are the ways of the just. The best window to the eternal is the one where we find ourselves not as people comfortably looking out, but one outside which we are the stranger looking in, uncertain and hopeful. And sometimes the darker it is inside, the better we see ourselves reflected. Our reflection shows our deepest intention.  It takes courage to see God within ourselves.  And that may be the message for the living.  Perhaps only the dead can reside in certainty.