As I write this, in the second week of January, the death toll from the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami has risen to nearly 160,000. For every person who has been killed there are family members, often injured themselves, who are left behind to grieve in situations of unimaginable horror, hopelessness and devastation. Whole towns in the Indonesian territory of Aceh have disappeared from the map; even in Somalia, some 3000 miles from the epicentre of the submarine earthquake that triggered the tsunami, nearly 300 people have been killed. Like the Boxing Day 2003 earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam, which killed over 26,000 people, the tsunami muted many New Year celebrations around the world.

The worldwide response to the disaster has provided a small measure of encouragement to those who might otherwise despair of human nature. Newspapers have carried daily updates, country by country, of the amount pledged by individuals as well as governments, while national administrations that are habitually sceptical about the role and value of the United Nations have recognised that the UN is the only international organisation that has the capacity and infrastructure to co-ordinate the response to such an enormous catastrophe. Aid agencies have been flooded with offers of help - practical as well as financial - and the three minute silence across Europe on 5th January, widely observed, demonstrated that human beings' understanding of our fundamental interrelatedness still has the power to transcend the fault-lines of a world increasingly fractured by politics, religion and economic forces.

The tsunami has also given the media, particularly the newspapers, permission to discuss an issue which they normally avoid: religious faith. A few days after the disaster struck, newspapers began to challenge people of faith to answer the obvious question: why would a loving God allow such a thing to happen? Despite the sometimes thinly veiled anti-religious sentiment that lurked behind the question, there subsequently appeared in the press a number of responses from people of different faith traditions - one of the most thoughtful and gracious from Archbishop Rowan Williams in The Daily Telegraph on the 2nd January. Characteristically, the archbishop does not attempt to deflect the profound questions about the nature of God raised by the devastating events in the Indian Ocean - indeed he states quite clearly that it would be wrong if such questions were not raised. But he goes on to counter the clamour for explanations by posing some stark questions of his own: "If some religious genius did come up with an explanation of exactly why all these deaths made sense, would we feel happier or safer or more confident in God? Wouldn't we feel something of a chill at the prospect of a God who deliberately plans a programme that involves a certain level of casualties?" I, for one, would feel neither happier nor safer.

There is a midrash - a rabbinic legend - in the Jewish Talmud that tells of how the angels in heaven began to break into song when the Egyptians were drowned in the Sea of Reeds as they pursued the escaping Israelites. The midrash ends: "The angels were silenced by God Himself. 'This is no time to sing when My creatures, human beings whom I made, are drowning.!'". If our faith is to begin to confront the issues raised by the deaths, casualties and destruction caused by the tsunami, it must surely proceed from a starting point that excludes the glib or the instant response, that understands God to be weeping with us in the face of suffering and that is not afraid to proclaim a God who is as much the question as the answer, the journey as the destination. As Lent begins, may God be with us all in our weeping, our questioning and our journeying as well as in our joys, our thanksgivings and our celebrations.

30 January, 2005