Thursday 25 August 2011

Sunday 7 August 2011

Towards a theology of disaster

It's Monday morning and I'm reading blogs in bed. I can't believe that this gorgeous baby is sleeping next to me in his Moses basket, making baby snuffles. His life is so right! So fundamentally good! The love that engulfs new parents is so pure that it must be close to heaven's.

If I had been born 150 years ago, or in this day and age in a place where state-of-the-art obstetrics is not available, I would have been very likely to die in childbirth together with my baby. The pregnancy went overdue with no signs of labour. Given the size of my bump on my decidedly petite frame, doctors suspected cephalopelvic disproportion and booked me in for an elective C-section. Our child weighted in at 9lbs 10 oz.

By the time the operation was performed, he was swimming in grade III meconium-stained amniotic fluid. His AGPAR score the first minute was just 3 out of 10 and he needed heavy-handed intrusive resuscitation.

So now, theologically speaking, how does one handle this kind of information? Is it a case of simply thanking God for a fabulous outcome to what looked like a very hairy birth? Do we give thanks for modern medicine and the skills acquired by men and women over centuries which now regularly turn potential disasters into routine non-disasters?

If I'm being honest, I'm not very good at giving thanks. I've always got survivor's guilt because I can't help thinking of others who are not so lucky. In this instance, the 350 000 women who die in childbirth each year around the world. And I get incredibly angry with God. You're telling me that I and these hundreds of thousands of women were "intelligently designed" to die in childbirth? If nature was left to run its course without intervention our beautiful babies would never even have taken their first breath.

What kind of God designs such a f*cked up plan? A plan that could have killed me and my unborn baby? I'm not a bad person. I do my best to love my neighbours in all the ways I can. And my baby is surely the most innocent being in the entire universe. What kind of a f*cked up intelligent design is that?

I can't help myself. I'm no good at blocking out the negative. If we give thanks to God for nice things that happen to us why don't we blame God for the bad things? As this was unfolding in the last days of my pregnancy, I googled like a maniac about the whys of unqualified evils. Why cancer? Why AIDS? Why all this s**t?

I'm sad to say that the only answer that gave me any solace was someone typing in that either God is a sick b*stard, or there is no God. I knew I'd have to move on from this eventually, but right then cognitively this is where I was, and I was not prepared to pretend that this wasn't how I genuinely felt.

Now I'm thinking that we need a theology of disaster. And a good one at that. Not the usual lame-a**ed theodicies you come across. Christianity strikes me as one of the only religions that can handle disaster, although I don't yet know how. The cross is the ultimate disaste.

I must say that I do tremendously respect those authors who try to provide the best theology and pastoral care they can come up with. Even if they still don't convince me, I find their attempts incredibly moving. Harold Kushner's is case in point. I wish I had the inspiration to write the most pastoral book ever. Nowhere is good theology more needed. And good theology starts with the truth, all the truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how unpalatable.

And I'm starting to think that good theology also starts with the wonderful smell of my baby's hair. ´

I used to think that if you had not experienced disaster, you had no right to talk about it. But then disaster has a tendency to stun you and destroy your better faculties. So it might be that a new division of labour means that those who are still able to connect to the smell of heaven have a role to play. It takes joy, it takes ecstasy, to delve that deep. And I've got both of them lying in a Moses basket next to me.

Friday 5 August 2011

New arrival!



We love this little guy so much it hurts! Needless to say, I'm an emotional mess of crazy postpartum hormones but it feels awesome. More soon!