The Pope, the coronavirus and a God/the God/his God
nytimes.com/2020/11/26/opin … e=Homepage
[b]In this past year of change, my mind and heart have overflowed with people. People I think of and pray for, and sometimes cry with, people with names and faces, people who died without saying goodbye to those they loved, families in difficulty, even going hungry, because there’s no work.
Sometimes, when you think globally, you can be paralyzed: There are so many places of apparently ceaseless conflict; there’s so much suffering and need. I find it helps to focus on concrete situations: You see faces looking for life and love in the reality of each person, of each people. You see hope written in the story of every nation, glorious because it’s a story of daily struggle, of lives broken in self-sacrifice. So rather than overwhelm you, it invites you to ponder and to respond with hope.[/b]
And on and on and on. Heartfelt perhaps, but as with so many other religionists, an utter refusal to acknowledge the fact that if this God of his does in fact exist then He is Himself responsible for the existence of the coronavirus. And hundreds and hundreds of other pathogens, diseases and physical afflictions.
Unless, of course, He is not omnipotent in regard to His creation.
And there is an underlying message throughout this particular sermon:
God asks us to dare to create something new.
In other words, that maybe the coronavirus is God’s way of spurring us on to become, what, Catholics like the Pope?
Or Pedro?
Sure, I recognize what prompts this particular reaction of mine. That I am myself virtually powerless in the face of all the terrible ordeals that afflict the human race. And that I actually need for God to exist so that at least there is someone or something to blame. Better that than lump all of the ordeals into the brute facticity of an essentially meaningless existence.
But, for me, it is always about theodicy. And the sheer absurdity of reconciling the world as it is with a so-called “loving, just and merciful” Creator.