At the end of one of the mystery plays, one involving Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents from Matthew's gospel, they do something we would never think to do, now.
Something fundamental changed for Europeans and Christians sometime during the Enlightenment, if not earlier. We decided we were in control of our destiny, that we controlled our fate, and little by little we decided God was at our right hand. I'm not speaking of atheists and agnostics and non-believers; I'm speaking of Christians. We decided God was our best friend, who wanted the best for us right now, and we moreover pulled a kind of sly anti-Semitism on ourselves, and decided the God of the "Old Testament" was a God of Wrath, and the God of our New Testament, was a God of love. How this transformation occurred was not to be looked into. God was good, and God was love, and that was all we needed.
All we needed, of course, because otherwise we didn't need God. At least, not so much as we had. We didn't need God to drop rain on the crops, we had irrigation. We didn't need God to bless our plantings; we had fertilizers. We had tractors, we had farming techniques, we had machines and factories and lives in cities, and God was relegated to a social obligation.
And pretty soon, we didn't even want God as an explanation. Earthquake destroys Lisbon? Where was God? Hurricane strikes the Gulf Coast? Can't be an "act of God." Because God is love. God is good.
But what if we accepted good and bad from God, again, like Job? What if we had an attachment to God that made us accept God was the Creator of the Universe, and shaped even the living creatures, the ones born perfect, the ones born without arms, or legs, or eyes, or with spina bifida, or other problems? What if we accepted what came from God because it came from God? What then?
Sounds Jewish, doesn't it, or almost alien? It wasn't always so. At the end of that mystery play, in celebration of the mystery of the birth of Jesus the Christ told in Matthew, in recognition of the mystery that death plays an essential role in that story, the characters all join in a Te Deum: a hymn of thanksgiving to God. All the characters: the Holy Family, Herod, the Magi, the soldiers, and the murdered children and their weeping mothers. All of them.
Could we do that now, after Hurricane Katrina? Could we survey the damage, the loss, the horror, the suffering, the sruvivors, the problems we will have for years to come, and offer up a Te Deum to God? Not immediately, to be sure; but ever? Should we be able to?
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