I don’t need sermons that try to soothe my anguish over 6 million children suffering and dying in Pakistan because of the floods. This anguish is my only connection to the nightmare. Without it I’d be oblivious to the suffering.
But I am looking to my faith for help. This flood, like the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Pakistan and the tsunami a few years earlier, is killing and destroying and spreading disease so fast and with such ferocity that its simply overwhelming. In the wake of this calamity I feel a bit of creeping despair.
The other day I saw a photo of children somewhere in Pakistan. It was painful to see. These boys and girls were about 4 or 5 years old. They were sitting around a flat tray - maybe an actual tray but just as likely a piece of debris - and on it looked to be some kind of grain. The children were huddled around the food. A few of the children had welts on their faces. All of them looked dirty and tired. Their hands were scooping up handfuls of the grain and placing them in their mouths.
Under normal circumstances the children’s behavior in the image might be described as “eating greedily” but not so in this context. It’s been many hours or more since they last had food and by this point, a week or more into the flooding, even these small children sense the scarcity of food.
I know that I can do this to help and I can do that in my free time. For example, I can give money for humanitarian relief in the amount of a weeks worth (or even a few months worth) of Starbuck’s coffee without flinching. And that’s without actually giving up the daily coffee fix.
But what I really need to do is step it up a few notches and to do more. What I need is a call to action that tells me I must step up and that I must act.
The magnitude of the horror - depicted in photos and videos posted on the internet - leaves no doubt that the scale of the disaster is epic and that the human suffering is staggering. The 20 million internally displaced Pakistanis, of which 6 million or so are children, need an an enormous relief effort just to sustain them as this “slow tsunami” continues. If the decision to help remains just an option - a good deed to be done in order to feel good - then will these children get the help they need? My gut says no.
I need some spiritual guidance. Faith is important to me and if I can find something in my faith that compels to me act - not just rewards me for it - then perhaps I can really push myself. I’d like an imam to articulate a call to service that puts this catastrophic natural disaster into perspective vis-a-vis my duty to God and my duty to my fellow man. Tell me that I personally must do something. Tell me that I need to give and to work and to put myself into uncomfortable situations in order to help these children who are in desperate need.
So far, no good.
“It’s God’s Will.” “Have patience.” “Pray.” These are the prevailing sentiments from the spiritual leaders I’ve run across in the mosque.
My response is: maybe, I’m trying and I do, respectively. But surely they can say more, right?
I read that an imam in Pakistan explained the floods there in this way: they are a punishment for those who have sinned and a test for those who are righteous. Really?
Does this mean that the people suffering and dying in the floods are sinners? And the rest of us - sitting abroad or in Pakistan itself - who are safe, sound and far from harms way are righteous? No, that can’t be right.
Is this imam suggesting that the Pakistani child whose image haunts me - with his face covered with flies as he looks out with eyes unblinking - is a sinner? What sin did he commit to earn himself such a harsh punishment I wonder?
God has something to do with the floods in Pakistan, but it’s far more complex and subtle than simply being “His wrath upon sinners”. A friend of mine, an agnostic from a Christian background, argued that the lesson to be drawn from the flood is that we have a duty to help each other in times of need and that this obligation is based on our shared humanity.
A man who presumably believes in a benevolent God attributes the suffering to the victims’ sins and to God’s punishment while an agnostic finds a far more humane and compassionate lesson. I’ll take the latter.
I’ll take it because it makes sense to me. A world in which I have a duty to my fellow man based on our shared humanity - a bond that transcends race, ethnicity and religion - is a world I can believe in. A duty to my fellow man is a principle I can build a good life upon. And it’s a frame through which I can internally manage the horror of the Pakistan flood without needing to tune it out (which is so easy to do).
While very few imams invoke “duty” and “humanity” when making passing reference this Ramadan to the floods in Pakistan, both are well grounded in my Islamic faith. In fact, I believe that striving to serve humanity epitomizes God-consciousness and that this is the principle God would want us all to choose to live by. This, I believe, is the connection between God and the Pakistan floods.
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