The Primal Shrug: Nature’s Indifference & The Church

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Honor the Lord with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: so shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine.”—Proverbs 3: 9-10

“Between 1753 and 1786, 103 French sextons were electrocuted pulling their rain-soaked bell ropes in an effort to disperse lightning.”—The Wordspinner

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—9/19/11—“The gods are larky tonight,” says one aboriginal to another as both are struck by cream pies from heaven.

Starting in the 1950s, as best I can judge, The New Yorker started publishing a series of cartoons by several hands showing an often nearsighted God standing at the edge of a cloud and throwing down the kitchen sink, the garbage, pub “darts,” chocolate bars, a sheaf of lawsuits, and plain vanilla lightning.

In the 80s, He grows lazy and uses a TV remote. As the 90s dawn, He’s sitting at a computer observing some urban schmuck. As the victim walks under a piano being hoisted to a penthouse, God reaches for the key labeled, “Smite.”

Recently, He was shunted to the disabled list when His doctor declared He was out for the season with a torn rotator cuff. But He’s evidently come back strong: in the last year or so, the Black Saturday bush fires have torched the Melbourne area, an earthquake in Haiti has brought an entire country to its knees, a volcano in Iceland stopped air traffic in Europe, and that hole in the Gulf spewed a half million tons of crude oil before it was plugged.

I know, BP caused that last one, but if God really cares about us, He could have pinched off that hole with one small seismic shudder. For heaven’s sake, the pipe was seven inches in diameter!

As one who has long been in the position of trying to explain John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Ben Franklin’s claim that “Whatever is, is just,” I try to stay current on how God treats his creation, especially His church.

Let me review the last couple of centuries: on All Saints Day of 1755, the Lisbon earthquake shook down several churches, a convent, a hospital, and a cathedral. This uppercut was followed by a neat one-two combination: a tsunami and a conflagration, all of which left around 50,000 dead or about as many Americans who died in Viet Nam. In the Deity’s inscrutable way, He left more brothels standing than houses of worship.

In 1760, a confidently ungrounded Venetian church volunteered to store the city’s gun powder in its crypt. Seven years later, it was struck by lightning, killing some 3,000 residents in the area.

In 1886 the Very Reverend Dr. J. B. Kavanagh of Kildare, Ireland was killed when a stone cherub in the ceiling of his church broke off and struck him on the head.

In the earthquake and subsequent fires of 1906, many San Franciscans noted the irony of allowing Hotaling’s whiskey warehouse to stand while many of the city’s churches fell or burned or both.

Now imagine a steeple impaling a sanctuary roof in a Florida hurricane, the National Cathedral losing three of the four pinnacles on the central tower in an earthquake, several dead refugees who’d sought asylum from a tornado in an Alabama church, and a Louisiana place of worship with three inches of mud on the floor after a flood.

Finally, consider the two-year old who drowned playing in a baptismal font and the minister electrocuted during a baptism when his microphone fell into the holy water.

Most of these stories came from the Greenville News, which does a poor job covering world events, so if you’re thinking God is anti-Christian, I suggest going through the files of a major paper in Beijing, Cairo, or Mumbai. A brief search I made turned up the following: in the hajj of 2006, at least 360 pilgrims were “crushed in a stampede to throw pebbles at Satan.” And one pilgrim from Pakistan was swallowed by a shifting sand dune. His body has never been found. Judging from the evidence, I’d say the Church has about as much clout with the Almighty as gnats; maybe less because, from where I sit, it seems the gnats are winning.

After the Lisbon quake mentioned above, one British vicar startled his congregation by arguing that the massive loss of life was a sign of the Almighty’s mercy because Portugal deserved far worse: its armies had slaughtered uncounted thousands in colonizing the New World. Perhaps so; I’m in no position to judge the compassion of shifting tectonic plates and a tsunami 50 feet tall, but why wait until 1755, when the conquistadors were exterminating innocents as early as 1505?

Matthew actually got it right about AD 70 when he observed that the rain falls on the just and unjust, but the Church has largely ignored this simple fact and metaphor. It seems that after every flood there’s one preacher who concludes the disaster was not a bad thing but a generous foretaste of the apocalypse. This clever argument turns the recent devastation into something good for the believers, and bad for the doubters.

Nineteenth-century scientists, most of whom were faithful members of one church or another, said God’s benevolence lurked in every horror. One could not call the Deity malevolent, they argued, if He opened a door for each He shut. Thus, obliterated homes are a trifling inconvenience compared to the fertile mud every flood brings, and the deaths caused by lightning are compensated by the twelve pounds of nitrogen that thunder storms annually bestow on every acre.

I don’t know about you, Gentle Reader, but if lightning killed one of our grandchildren, no amount of fertilizer would assuage my broken heart.

Darwin’s faith in benevolence, what was left of it after his daughter died at age ten, was quashed while studying the wasps. One species, he discovered to his disappointment, paralyzes and lays its eggs in caterpillars in order that the wasp grubs will have a living larder as long as they need it.

It’s a bit like a human infant hatching inside its mother’s breast, feeding at will, and bursting out at age 21 with all the education it will ever need. The only moral Darwin could draw from parasitism was the neutrality of nature; for life, it seems, is like a lump of copper ore exposed in a landslide. Heated briefly to twice the temperature of the sun when struck by lightning, the ore bleeds molten copper but, cooling in the wind and rain, it soon begins to oxidize.

Life most likely began in a similar way. The right ingredients and forces were in the right place at the right time. It just happened. We could not help ourselves.

Was God stirring the pot or Nature? I’ll let you decide.

The French poet Paul Valery argued that God made everything from a void, but “sometimes the void shows through.”

I recall reading of an English fox hunt to which several of the royals were invited. It was such a splendidly pompous occasion, with lots of red coats and polished tack, that the local vicar was asked to bless the proceedings before the fox was released.

While all heads were bowed, the hounds meandered about the freshly mown field, and one urinated on the only vertical structure in sight: the vicar’s starched, white robe. The dog knew better than to void himself on a horse’s leg. At any rate, the void came shining through.

It usually does.