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Address by Bishop Gunnar Stålsett at the memorial service in Oslo Cathedral on January 15, 2005, for the victims of the tsunami disaster in South East Asia.
We have invited you to this memorial service in the cathedral in all humility. Humility because we know that your suffering and despair cannot be helped by empty words or pious platitudes. A person who has been overtaken by an incomprehensible tragedy is unable to accept the answers that reason or faith can provide to their desperate cry of Why? And they are right. For there is no rational or theological explanation for why tragedy should strike blindly. This is just as inexplicable whether one person or thousands are affected. There is only a cry without an answer.
Only you who have lost a child, a beloved partner, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a friend, can know this pain. We pray that your pain will be soothed by the love that mourns with you. This is the message of the Church. Christ shared our pain when He cried out to His Father, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
One of the most beautiful verses in the Bible reads: “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11, 28). These words are an open invitation. They are numerous who are labour and are heavy laden. When I hear Jesus’ words, I imagine what a great multitude there would be if everyone for whom life is a struggle were to accept this invitation. If everyone bearing a heavy burden could see that there is a place where they can lay their burden down. The word “rest” touches our physical and mental pain, our fear and our unrest. Life’s burdens manifest themselves in many ways. This invitation offers words of comfort in a difficult world.
“Space reserved for being serious is hard to come by in a modern society,” said the once so radical American writer Susan Sontag, who died before Christmas. She was talking about a space where it is possible to expand one’s sense of reality. She was expressing a feeling that is widespread in our culture, the longing for a sacred space.
She calls for a space reserved for serious reflection. A quiet space in a society so filled with noise that it leaves little room for sorrow. We are reminded that grief, longing, all the serious sides of life must have a space that is large enough, and enduring enough, for our needs. In our hectic media-dominated society we must strive to prevent grief being perceived as a commodity, as something troublesome and intrusive that we can switch off when we have had enough. Grief is an integral part of life, even the grief for which there are no words, and so are despair, abandonment, loss and anger. A space to grieve is right here, in this cathedral.
At a time like this we may find that our perception of reality has to be expanded. It is easy to forget that there is nothing in life that cannot be broken. St Paul has this in mind when he speaks of faith as a treasure in “earthen vessels.” A clay vessel is a fragile thing. To believe in God is not to limit reality but to extend it. To believe in God is to have a vision of life that encompasses eternity in time and life in death. This is why the Church offers a space for the solemn reality of life and of death.
This is a space to which we can come with all our questions, even those that cannot be answered but that this tragedy has forced us to ask. Where is the sense in all this? Where are you, God? The Church can bear the burden of the unanswerable. The sacred space embraces our feeling of being forsaken. We can hear and see that we are not alone. Others are suffering together with us, praying with us, sharing our burden. We come with a silent cry that finds resonance in the music and words that express, amplify and transform our grief. We come in darkness to light a candle in this sacred space.
A space reserved for being serious? Such a space must have room for the pain of remembering. A space where we dare to face unacknowledged thoughts and feelings. A space where there is room for regret for what was never said, for the love that was never fully expressed, for everything we wish had been different. For some people the greatest pain is that they never had a chance to say goodbye in a healing embrace that would have put everything right. From the perspective of the Church, eternal forgiveness is open to all.
In this solemn space we not only look inwards, into ourselves, we also reach out, towards our fellow human beings. I cannot forget the faces of the children. For me the empty stare of a child in shock is the ultimate expression of the vulnerability we all share. But it is also the children who show us the vital force of love in the midst of the tragedy. They are intuitively aware of what we all need to do. In the words of the children’s prayer by the Swedish writer Britt Halqvist:
For children who have got no bed to sleep in,
Who do not get the food
and care we get,
For all the children who have lost their mother,
And most of all for
those who have no home,
We pray, dear God, that you will give them shelter,
Send them people
who can give them what they need.
A space reserved for being serious? Is this not a call to live a different life? The horrifying images have not only shown us the destructive forces of nature, they have also brought home to us the great injustice in our world, the gulf between rich and poor. Hungry, ragged and homeless, without a livelihood, most of the survivors will have to build a new future out of nothing.
Yet there is also a global tsunami that is called poverty, and it strikes every single day, year after year, affecting a quarter of the world’s population. And a wave of death called HIV/AIDS has taken tens of millions of lives while the world has looked on in silence and apathy. We need to lift our eyes to a global horizon and commit ourselves to sharing what we have, not just now and then, but always. Perhaps in the midst of all this suffering there is a glimpse of hope: hope that this unprecedented disaster will tear the blindfold from our eyes, rouse us from our complacency, and give us a new perception of reality that inspires true commitment.
A solemn space also has room for joy. God’s creations are not our enemies but our friend. Waves do not always need to be a source of fear – let us see the natural world once again as a source of beauty and renewal. A solemn space has room for laughter, for playfulness, for the freedom to test our strength against the forces of nature. Let us take courage and look ahead. It is not death, but hope, that has the last word. Not destruction, but reconstruction. Here, in this solemn space, let us raise our eyes to a new day in love and faith. Our grief for those we have lost is deep but not boundless. It is born of something even stronger: joy – joy in the past, joy in the present and joy in the future.