Age-Old Query: Where Was God?

The day of the horrific shootings that left 15 people dead at a Littleton, Colo., high school, Rabbi Laura Geller of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills had a previously scheduled appointment with a 13-year-old girl.

The youth was there for bat mitzvah training, but the subject quickly turned to the deaths.

“She said she was scared to go to school,” said Geller, who was taken aback by the girl’s alarm. After all, she was enrolled in a prestigious private school on the Westside, the last place one would expect children to fear for their lives.

Geller set aside the lesson plan and gently spoke with her student. Yes, the rabbi told her, it is true that things happen in the world that we cannot control. But everyone working together can make communities safer.

For members of the clergy throughout Southern California, this was a week in which they were often called upon to explain the unexplainable: How can such things happen in a world that you believe has been created by a loving God?

“There are certain tragedies that defy the ability of words to express,” said Maher Hathout, spokesman for the Islamic Center of Southern California in Los Angeles. “This is definitely one of them.”

The Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray of First African Methodist Episcopal Church in South-Central Los Angeles said, “It is easy to slip into the trite when there’s trauma.”

Nonetheless, the questions are insistent and urgent. From Geller’s Jewish religious school in Beverly Hills to a Roman Catholic school in Encino and an Islamic school in Pasadena, young people and their parents are asking why and wondering, where was God?

The answers offered differ from one minister to the next. But all those interviewed agree that the first priority is to try to meet the immediate emotional needs of those involved.

“The pastoral issue is very important, not to try to trump up some kind of answer but to be present in a compassionate way,” said Father Austin Doran, pastor of Our Lady of Grace parish in Encino. “In the long run the Lord gives the light of understanding to people who have dealt with terrible tragedies, but we can offer compassion and care.”

The Rev. Ignacio Causteria, pastor of Pacific Palisades Community United Methodist Church, said he tries to guide people to pray for the victims and their families, including the parents of the two teenagers believed to have been the murderers.

“God only knows what kind of agony they’re in the midst of right now, wondering how their kids went that way, blaming themselves,” Causteria said. “I couldn’t even begin to get into their skins.”

Moreover, all agree that the worst thing to do is to try to rush the healing process. “What the religious community has to say to our culture is that grieving is a good thing, and you don’t just fix it. It will take a long time,” said the Very Rev. Mary June Nestler, dean of the Episcopal Theology School at Claremont. She cautioned against a tendency by the media and well-meaning people to use “the language of hope and healing” before it is appropriate.

Bishop Charles E. Blake, pastor of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ, said: “I’ve long since learned that I have nothing that I can say that will lessen the intensity of the pain that a bereaved person feels when they lose a loved one. There is nothing you can say to ease that pain or to accelerate the healing. They must heal by themselves.”

As for the causes of such tragedy, it is often far easier to identify the immediate cultural and sociological factors, such as the availability of guns and violence in the media, than to understand where God fits into the picture, clergy members said.

In a statement issued on behalf of U.S. Catholic bishops, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony said “this violence that haunts our nation reflects the breakdown of family and community life, the absence of spiritual roots, the loss of respect for life, the pervasiveness of violent images from the media, and the easy accessibility of guns and other weapons.”

“We live in a society where violence is too often seen as a solution to our most intractable problems,” he added. “Violence is not the solution: It is the most clear sign of our failures.”

With all the media attention on Littleton, several clergy urged Americans not to forget that violence can be an everyday occurrence in minority communities.

“I do have something to say that has weighed heavily on me as a white man,” said Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. “And that is the national outcry, completely justified here, is matched by an equal silence for the ongoing slaughter of young people who happen to be poor or are of color and for whom this is nothing new,” he told an interfaith gathering Thursday night at the Islamic Center of Southern California. “I am shamed by that and believe that we will be called to judgment for it.”

Other clergy interviewed cited violence in the media, particularly the entertainment media, including violent computer games, and violence in motion pictures and television, including cartoons.

“Our art and our sports are glorifying violence to the extent that it is intoxicating and making us numb,” said Hathout of the Islamic center. All the more reason, said Blake, that religious leaders must mobilize their congregations to work for peace and justice. Murray said much more attention must be paid to mentoring young people.

But, they conceded, the tougher issue remains: the classic question of why bad things happen to good people, why evil can exist in a world created by a loving God?

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Nestler said many ask why God did this or allowed it to happen. “The very first thing,” she said, “is God doesn’t. This is not God’s work. This is the work of two very disturbed young people. God does not wish this on anyone. God is not judging the community or the school. We have to assure people of God’s loving kindness and immense sadness,” she said.

Murray said the question is not where is God, but where are God’s people? “If you ask, ‘where is God?’ I say, ‘Where is God not?’ God is there first of all providing eternal rest for those victims of the tragedy. God is there ministering to us to be there so that we prevent such.”

Causteria said there is no getting around the fact that life is complex, difficult and unpredictable. “Religion is not a cure-all, or an insurance policy. It’s a set of stories and wisdom to help us make it through the difficulties of life,” he said.

“In our preaching and teaching, perhaps our most frequent temptations is to make things sound tidier than they are,” Doran said. “We need to live with the questions and to live our faith in the context of these big questions.”