A Reflection on "Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors", by Piers Paul Read

Certainly their quarrels were never serious when compared to the strong bond of their common purpose. Especially when they prayed together at night they felt an almost mystical solidarity, not only among themselves, but with God. They had called to Him in their need and now felt him close at hand. Some had even come to see the avalanche as a miracle which had provided them with more food.
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Ch 5

The reason why the other fifteen survivors looked askance at Parrado’s return to the kind of life he had led before was that they themselves had a more elevated – almost mystical – concept of their experience…that they were the beneficiaries of a miracle. Delgado considered that to have lived through the accident, the avalanche, and the weeks that followed could be ascribed to the hand of God, but that the expedition was more a manifestation of human courage. (Some of the survivors) felt that God played a fundamental role in their survival…(Others) were more inclined to believe in all modesty that their survival and escape could be ascribed to their own efforts…
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Ch 15, page 344

As I read the book I saw how acutely the Big Questions get addressed when you face a faith-wrenching experience like the one in the Andes. Most of those on the Fairchild had backgrounds in Roman Catholic education; and, regardless of their individual state of grace at the time of the crash, they brought to the crash site a belief in Christ’s promise to “be with (them), even unto the ends of the earth.”

I have never, thankfully, faced something I would consider a crisis. I have not lost a close family member, nor faced the trial of a long, drawn-out illness. I have not caught myself in any real way trying to make deals with God. Despite that I tend to be more pessimistic than I would like to be. I constantly fear what John Irving’s Garp called the “Undertoad” – that foreboding that something tragic is imminent. I try not to jinx my good fortune by writing about it, or dwelling on it, other than to quietly acknowledge its blessing, and to offer a little prayer of thanks.

I have, however, seen people face tragedy. More often than not, they seem to profess a stronger faith in God as a result of the crisis. I have to admit that for many years I found that unfathomable, steeped as I was in believing that God was omnipotent and providential. As such, he was at best capable of preventing those tragedies, at worst responsible for them. I was uncomfortable with the idea that these events were part of some grander story; one that may not unfold immediately, and may be beyond our comprehension, but ultimately was good and just. In fact, it was best not to question these events, but rather to rely on the Apostle Paul’s observation to the Rome church that “all things work together for good for those called to Christ’s purpose.”

These boys faced the horror of sudden death of some of their mates, and slower, agonizing deaths for others. They prayed the Rosary together, and then watched the one leading the prayer weaken and die. Their hopes continually crashed with a blunt force equal to that of the wreck. They were left with little choice but to eat the flesh and entrails of their friends. And yet, many described their 70-day experience as “mystical”. No one seemed ready to throw in their hat with Job’s wife – to curse God and die.

In fact, as the cited passage describes, many saw the hand of God at work in their individual survival. For them, it seems God was not responsible for the suffering and death of the victims but rather was the Force that kept them from the same fate.

It is interesting that the show of religiosity and faith was centered among the most invalid of the survivors. Is it fair to say that those who were weakest felt the greatest need to rely on God? Parrado and the other expeditionaries were the strongest, and seemed the least inclined to attribute their survival to God. Delgado’s observation that while Grace worked among those at the plane the expedition was a “manifestation of human courage” acutely captures the religion of many today: We need only rely on God when we cannot do it ourselves.

I struggle with that notion. I tend to no longer see events as segments of some pre-ordained whole. We have responsibilities, and free wills to carry them out. There are random events that in themselves are neither good nor evil, but nevertheless result in tragedy. There are things I can guard against, and things I cannot. If I submit to that worldview, is it hypocritical to run to God when I become overwhelmed and am no longer strong enough to do it myself? That’s to say, is it okay to ask for God’s protection for my 16 year-old when he is driving, and not for His guidance in every other part of my life? Those may not seem like terribly complex questions, but for someone raised in fundamentalism they are issues that cannot lay undisturbed.

Ed Bowling
January, 2007

A Reflection on "The Color Purple", by Alice Walker

A Reflection on The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Madame, he said, when Aunt Theodosia finished her story and flashed her famous medal (for “ her service as an exemplary missionary in the King’s colony”) around the room, do you realize King Leopold cut the hands off workers who, in the opinion of his plantation overseers, did not fulfill their rubber quota? Rather than cherish that medal, Madame, you should regard it as a symbol of your unwitting complicity with this despot who worked to death and brutalized and eventually exterminated thousands and thousands of African peoples.

Well, said Samuel, silence struck the gathering like a blight. Poor Aunt Theodosia! There’s something in all of us that wants a medal for what we have done. That wants to be appreciated. And Africans certainly don’t deal in medals. They hardly seem to care whether missionaries exist.

The Africans never asked us to come, you know. There’s no use blaming them if we feel unwelcome.
The Color Purple, page 234.

When I was ten or eleven, a missionary couple came to our church to show us slides and to talk about their work in some country in Africa, one whose name has changed a time or two since then. The woman talked about the mission’s school, which operated in a small cinder-block building with a tin roof. Slide after slide showed the building overflowing with children, so many that some classes were held outside due to the lack of space. The school was at a crossroad: Either a larger facility would have to be built, or they would have to turn some children away. Statistics about the number of village children, per capita income, infant mortality and illiteracy came at us rapid-fire, and she concluded her part by sharing anecdotes about one child or another convincing her parents to come to the mission to hear about Jesus.

Her husband took it from there, effusing about the religious conversions among the adults and the diminishing influence of the shamans and folk religion. His patter of statistics began with the number of young natives who felt a call to the ministry, and concluded with an estimate for the cost of building a seminary. “This is the Great Commission in action! This is what Christ told his disciples to do!” I was mesmerized.

The congregation dutifully contributed, and I was thrown into my first of many vocational dilemmas. Clearly, the work done by the missionaries was God’s work, I thought, and without their efforts all those people would be eternally lost. What calling could possibly be more important than to help save the souls of the children in those pictures?

Reading Nettie’s account of the mission to Africa reminded me of that night, and the subsequent conflict that exists in me today. I did not become a missionary, but have known several, and I admire their spirit of service and compassion. There is a selflessness about the vocation, and a genuine reliance on faith. And while there are more and more missionaries that see their purpose as primarily (exclusively?) humanitarian, there still exist thousands who rest in the conviction that they are called to “go into all the world and preach the gospel…baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

Therein lies my conflict. Years ago, I began to better appreciate diversity in faith and culture. I studied western and eastern religions in graduate school, and enjoyed spending the weekends taking in a variety of worship and ritual services. I enjoyed studying the history of a faith, as well as its cultural context. Occasionally I grappled with the inevitable questions about which religion was the true religion, or at least the truest. I tended to skirt a final, or for that matter even a workable, answer to that question, preferring to place it in the realm of academic discipline rather than rule for life. Thus, proselytizing indigenous people became little more to me than a curious idiosyncrasy of a religion.

Over the past few years, however, faith has beckoned me. That faith is not the certainty of religious conviction that served my parents so well throughout their life, but it is at its core Christian. Recently, I have had difficulty reconciling the inherent exclusivity of Christianity with noble ideas about the equal sanctity of all faiths and cultures. I would like to be one of the cool liberals, readily accepting the validity and equality of opposing positions, but I keep coming back to the notion that if everything is Truth, then nothing is Truth.

If one embraces a religion, and identifies himself as an adherent, does he do a disservice to his faith by watering it down, equating it to all others? A Christian says that Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life, no one passes to the Father” except through him, while a Muslim prays the Shahadah: “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger.” They are not saying the same thing, and because they are not, they each have missionaries. The missionaries may seek novel ways to make their gospel pertinent and understandable to those they seek to proselytize, but to equate their religion with all others makes the key component of their mission immaterial. I think they are obligated to be set apart.

Samuel’s loneliness and lament that the “Africans never asked us to come” crosses the mind of many missionaries, I suspect. Despite that, I think it is right that they serve.

Ed Bowling
January 2007