God and the Tsunami

Stuart Buck writes about the crisis of faith some have because of the catastrophe in south Asia. It's the standard question: how can a loving God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Part of the answer, I think, is something I've written before, namely that "God is concerned primarily with our spiritual lives, not our physical lives" whereas we humans tend to be completely focused on this life. In the end, the suffering experienced in this world will either be infinitely dwarfed by the suffering of Hell or be made to completely disappear against the shining paradise of Heaven.

But, there is another point to be made. In one of the comments to Buck's post, a writer quotes C.S. Lewis saying

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the "unimaginable sum of human misery". Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must also remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

This is an important point. Catastrophes on the order of the tsunami or the Holocaust bring about the kind of questions being raised now, but catastrophes on a much smaller scale do not. It is as if the suffering of those victims in Asia is so much greater than the victims, say, of the flooding in California this week. What this really reflects is the callousness in our hearts. We have come to accept a certain level of suffering and pain. Our attitude is, if five people die in a fiery car crash, well that's sad and unfortunate, because we are accustomed to people dying in car crashes. It requires an event out of the ordinary, like the tsunami, to shock us into a reaction.

We face the danger of becoming insensitive to other's sufferings. Pain is pain, whether one person is suffering it, or one thousand. It is all the same.