The God Problem

I’ve got all kinds of things to worry about this week, just like everyone else and now, on top of it all, I have to worry about what to tell God about New Orleans. Our appointed Commander in Chief has directed us to spend this Friday praying for New Orleans and I take that seriously. The President must feel, as his sort of Christian does, that God needs not only more information about what has happened, but about what we need him to do to make it right in terms of our comfort. That however, contains the assumption that what happened had nothing to do with God’s intentions either because of his dereliction or ineptitude and I’m wary of letting God know just how little we think of his control over nature. Besides, millions prayed that the storm would miss them and that didn't help at all. That kind of prayer may just irritate him further.

But if God did have something to do with Katrina and the ensuing calamity, we have to be wary of asking him to undo it, since it may have served some grand purpose like preventing Mardi Gras or punishing New Orleans’ poor for our attempt to control the internal affairs of Iraq. Perhaps asking him to undo what we believe he has done, whether accidentally or not will make him more dyspeptic than he evidently is. I worry about that.

Then there’s the problem of the dead. If God doesn’t care, it would be presumptuous, if not undiplomatic to bring up the matter and if he does care, he’s made arrangements already – I just hate to nag him about these things, his temper being what our religious leaders say it is.

As to the survivors: if God has done all this for a purpose, should we dare to take care of them? What if the whole thing was about punishment? We have to be careful about humanitarianism in that case and if there was no purpose don’t we have to worry about seeming disloyal by cleaning up a mess he allowed? It would be like rubbing his nose in his mess. He may just get angry. Then too, if we pray that he will take care of the widows and orphans and the poor, aren’t we asking him to do our work for us? Seems like a catch 22 to me.

So somehow, praying makes it all seem like we just don’t trust the Big Dude, like it says on the coins. Maybe we ought to take that off the nickel lest we be challenged to live up to it. It’s just so hard to be a Nation Under God when God keeps getting in the way.