Katrina Was Not an Act of God

WARNING: the following article is a theological reflection on shit and why it happens. If you do not like the word “shit” you may substitute “excrement,” “fecal material,” “poop,” or any other word you prefer to describe the matter that smells and looks like shit.
If you do not believe in God, I have no problem with that and accept your idea as a possibility and you have to read no further. But you will still be left with the question of why shit happens. All I am trying to do here, a person who does believe in a higher power, is to share with you how I have come to live with the reality.
Finally, I believe that the ideas contained herein are the result of Latin American wisdom from the people of Nueva Tacagua, a barrio in Caracas, where the inhabitants were surrounded by shit. They had to make some sense out of it. They helped me to do so also.
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Katrina has come and gone and left havoc in her wake. President Bush and his team of Homeland Security bungle their way along as people suffer and die. And somewhere, someone is going to excuse them of their responsibility in all this and try to change the focus and talk about an “act of God.” I don’t believe it was. I believe in a God that said many times the past week, “Oh shit,” and cried. I have no idea what President Bush said or will say, or if he is able to cry. I do feel sorry for the man who won’t acknowledge mistakes and seems to think he is God.
For eight years I lived in a cardboard and tin shack in Nueva Tacagua. Day after day I saw my neighbors walk out of their homes with a newspaper in their hands. It was not the daily newspaper. It was an old newspaper with their morning dump inside. We didn’t speak to each other on such occasions. We didn’t even look at each other. We just walked out, threw our packet up or down the mountainside and returned to our shacks. It was not only a matter of physical relief; it was also a psychological elimination of frustration as we threw the parcel as far away as we could and tried to dream of a new day.
At the end of those eight years, I wrote a theology book in an attempt to capture on sheets of white paper what my neighbors had taught me with their scarred newspapers. I have shared the text with a number of friends. They have encouraged me to try to publish it, but almost all say that no publisher will accept it with the title I want: THE GOD OF SHIT.
But writers are always told to write about what they know best. I am an expert on shit. No I didn’t work in a hospital laboratory looking in some test tubes for eight hours each day, five days a week. I lived surrounded by it twenty-four hours a day. And if God is God of everything, God is also the God of shit. Why does it happen? Why did Katrina happen?
Give me a believer who will tell me all about an all-loving and all-powerful God” and then I’ll show that person Katrina and ask what was so loving about that. If God is almighty, then God is cruel and Mark Twain’s image of Satan in “The Mysterious Stranger” is a perfect portrayal of this God. I’m sorry; I no longer buy the concept.
I have come to believe in a mighty, mighty God. I no longer believe in an ALL-mighty one.
There is so much that is good and beautiful in the world. I like the idea that it is God’s handiwork. It makes me feel good and gives me hope.
But then shit happens. My stomach aches. Water pours out of my eyes. My heart weighs a ton. I look at this God in whom I believe and I ask why. The only answer that I get is, “I didn’t want it to be that way. I tried my best to make it all perfect and am still trying, but I goofed and I am sorry.” And then we cry together and go back to work, trying to correct the situation.
In my way of thinking, God didn’t want what human beings have dubbed as “acts of God.” They are not acts of some devil either. They are simply the results of mistakes God made in creating—big and bad mistakes of a mighty, mighty power.
I write this on a computer and I realize that at any moment the screen may go blank and I might lose everything that I have written. It is a great machine. It isn’t perfect. Neither is my God and yet I am at peace and in love with my God.
In Nueva Tacagua I saw people who were acting as though they were insane. They were. They were also hungry and when they had food, they were no longer crazy. You may think I am nuts, too, and need something to nourish my brain at this moment, but (as an example of my way of belief) I think President Bush lacks some books in his library. If he had them all, he wouldn’t be acting as he is and as he has. God flubbed with George W. And the world is suffering because of the mistake.
In spite of it all, I still have hope. Mired in the shit that surrounds all of us and especially with Katrina at this moment, I think of the words of Tony, a barrio youth, who one day said that maybe we were the shit of Caracas. Then he added that shit is manure, and that from the midst of that shit the world would someday see some beautiful flowers. Life would spring up again.
I wish my God were perfect and all-powerful. He/she/it is not. I am not either. So, together, we go on making mistakes, asking for forgiveness and crying each time we have to say, “Oh shit.”
We will also go on trying to change that reality.