In face of human tragedy, what's a pastor to say?
To stem losses in church membership, spiritual leaders search for better ways to explain awful events such as 9/11 and the Virginia Tech massacre.
from the July 25, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
Unprepared to cope?
Death and disease have been accepted facets of life for most of Christian history, but in modern times Western Christians have ceased to assume "that life is fleeting," says David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox theologian at Providence College in Rhode Island and the colloquy's keynote speaker. "Actual confrontation with suffering and death – for modern, Western human beings in industrial societies – comes as a kind of cosmic enormity, a kind of abomination."
Congregants who generally expect that their children will outlive them and that tragedy will otherwise be kept at bay may need to be shaken from spiritual complacency, says Dr. Hart. "It might be necessary for a pastor forcibly to remind people just how terrible" death and suffering are.
No one at the colloquy had pat explanations, and the mysteriousness of God's tolerance for suffering remained, for many, a mystery.
"We don't have easy answers," says Barbara Herber, pastor of First United Methodist Church in North Andover, Mass. "Our primary job is to sit with people in their suffering because it's really lousy to sit alone."
Still, pastors tried to articulate comprehensive theologies for people experiencing pain.
The Rev. Mr. Coleman recalled leading a memorial service earlier in the summer for an animal lover in her early 20s who died on her morning commute when she swerved her car to avoid hitting a deer. His aim at the time was to comfort her family, but here on the Cape he sought to clarify the logic behind his words then.
"Every death is unnatural and is contrary to the will of God," he said. "But there is not anything that can come between us and the love of God. We have hope that we'll all be raised in the last days."
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