The game is well & truly up, Archbishop Rowan Williams. You found the recent horrors in the Far East a somewhat trying test of your faith … yet - incredibly nay miraculously - somehow your faith survived. How touching … how unspeakably nauseating! What was ultimately on test was your reason and humanity, and both failed abysmally.
A young girl dies in excruciating agony from cancer of the throat, yet God loves her as a father loves his child? Ah, but not quite that sort of love … something mysteriously divine. In Aberfan, 116 little children die, some holding hands for comfort, smothered by thousands of tonnes of slag. More mysterious love from on high?
The years pass with more horrors: Vietnam, the Munich Olympics, the Killing Fields, Tiananmen Square, more recently earthquakes in Turkey. Who can keep track of it all? And exactly how much is the sacred affection diluted by ‘not quite that kind of love’.
Now, tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor die in Asia … yet God still loved them as some sort of cosmic daddy? The poor woman driven utterly insane by the death of her three children and who now is wandering the devastated streets hoping that whoever is looking after her drowned baby is feeding him well … is she another recipient of this wonderful, holy love? Just how much more ineffable affection can we take?
Was this simply a test, Archbishop Rowan Williams, and all this just for you? All this anguish, death and bereavement simply to provide you and your diminishing congregation with a bit of a puzzle, something to think about while warming yourself on a Winter’s evening by a cosy hearth at the Palace? How much God must truly love you.
Perhaps you remember Anthony Flew’s parable about two explorers who chance upon a clearing in the jungle. There they saw many flowers and many weeds growing side by side, and one of the explorers said, 'Some gardener must tend this plot!' So they pitched their tents and set a watch.
"But though they waited several days no gardener was seen. 'Perhaps he is an invisible gardener!' they thought. So they set up a barbed-wire fence and connected it to electricity. They even patrolled the garden with bloodhounds….But they heard no sounds, and saw no movements of the barbed wire. The bloodhounds never alerted them to the presence of any other in the garden than themselves. Yet, still the believer was convinced that there was indeed a gardener: 'There must be a gardener, invisible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound…who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.'
But the skeptical explorer asked, "Just how does…an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"
Rend your purple robes in shame, Archbishop Rowan Williams. They are in tatters anyway. Go to the beaches of Phuket, to Banda Aceh or to Sri Lanka. Spurn a face mask & breathe deeply, really deeply; it is God’s breath. Then with your head cleared by the invigorating stench, recite after me:
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
A young girl dies in excruciating agony from cancer of the throat, yet God loves her as a father loves his child? Ah, but not quite that sort of love … something mysteriously divine. In Aberfan, 116 little children die, some holding hands for comfort, smothered by thousands of tonnes of slag. More mysterious love from on high?
The years pass with more horrors: Vietnam, the Munich Olympics, the Killing Fields, Tiananmen Square, more recently earthquakes in Turkey. Who can keep track of it all? And exactly how much is the sacred affection diluted by ‘not quite that kind of love’.
Now, tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor die in Asia … yet God still loved them as some sort of cosmic daddy? The poor woman driven utterly insane by the death of her three children and who now is wandering the devastated streets hoping that whoever is looking after her drowned baby is feeding him well … is she another recipient of this wonderful, holy love? Just how much more ineffable affection can we take?
Was this simply a test, Archbishop Rowan Williams, and all this just for you? All this anguish, death and bereavement simply to provide you and your diminishing congregation with a bit of a puzzle, something to think about while warming yourself on a Winter’s evening by a cosy hearth at the Palace? How much God must truly love you.
Perhaps you remember Anthony Flew’s parable about two explorers who chance upon a clearing in the jungle. There they saw many flowers and many weeds growing side by side, and one of the explorers said, 'Some gardener must tend this plot!' So they pitched their tents and set a watch.
"But though they waited several days no gardener was seen. 'Perhaps he is an invisible gardener!' they thought. So they set up a barbed-wire fence and connected it to electricity. They even patrolled the garden with bloodhounds….But they heard no sounds, and saw no movements of the barbed wire. The bloodhounds never alerted them to the presence of any other in the garden than themselves. Yet, still the believer was convinced that there was indeed a gardener: 'There must be a gardener, invisible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound…who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.'
But the skeptical explorer asked, "Just how does…an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"
Rend your purple robes in shame, Archbishop Rowan Williams. They are in tatters anyway. Go to the beaches of Phuket, to Banda Aceh or to Sri Lanka. Spurn a face mask & breathe deeply, really deeply; it is God’s breath. Then with your head cleared by the invigorating stench, recite after me:
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
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