Living Amid the Headlines

Massacre in Bali, Washington Sniper, War on Terror—the list goes on. . . . Nathan Brown reflects on the headlines as another terrifying year comes to an end.

It’s the kind of thing that leaves one without anything to say—but about which so much is said. All of a sudden, even the word Bali means something different. It is no longer a place, it is an event, a painful scar. And then there are the attempts to understand and explain another tragedy. Even those seeking to make some kind of sense of it struggle for themselves—but are compelled to express those struggles in the black-and-white of a printed page.

Writing in the days following the Bali bombing, ex-patriate Australian Clive James admitted the haphazard progress toward filling his newspaper space: “I owe it to my dead, wounded and bereaved countrymen to say straight away that I have no clear idea of what that conclusion will be. This is no time to preach, and least of all from a prepared text” (The Guardian).

Unlike James, I know what my conclusion will be: a reminder that God still loves us; and an expression of belief that somehow God is still in control. But, as James suggests, preaching often doesn’t go particularly well in the face of such raw tragedy. I’m not going to preach, but share some thoughts as a young Australian living amid the headlines and trying to come to terms with the tragedies surrounding us.
While the conclusion is already outlined, the path toward that conclusion might be a little less certain.

amid the headlines
When we heard the news of the Bali bombing, we were in New York. Knowing we were Australian, someone mentioned there had been a bombing in Bali—and many Australians were missing. Late that Saturday night we visited Times Square. It was raining and the neon lights reflecting on the wet streets added to the cacophony of light on the buildings above and around us. We paused and watched the frantic headlines spell out the early details of the far-off tragedy.

Interspersed with updates on the carnage in Bali was the latest on the Washington sniper, at that time having claimed eight lives and bringing fear to streets, schools and workplaces across a wide area. It was another headline in which we—living and working in the Washington area—had a keen and horrified interest.

There was also continuing talk of war against Iraq and other more forgettable headlines of that particular day. And, of course, about 50 city blocks away was the large hole in the ground we visited the next day, marking the spot where a little more than a year ago the twin towers of the World Trade Center stood. Feeling the scars of that tragedy is now simply a part of being in New York City.

The inclement night caught up the city’s lights and reflected them back on the wet streets, the low clouds and even in the murky rain itself. Amid the damp fug of neon and drizzle, the apparent energy and disposability of the racing, lurid headlines belied the sombre and heart-wrenching questions they prompt.

the same questions
Reflecting again on these questions, I was reminded of a beautifully plaintive cover version of the Tom Waits song “Georgia Lee” I’d heard just a few days previously. The bustling concert space was stilled almost to the point of tears by the three haunting questions of the chorus: “Why wasn’t God watching? Why wasn’t God listening? Why wasn’t God there?”

These questions aren’t simply the philosophical musings of the stylishly disaffected poet; they’re the cries of our hearts that recur with each new tragedy, each new heartbreaking headline. In the midst of tragedy, we’re prompted to reach out—even if at the same time we again question whether there is anything or Anyone to reach out to.

The Courier-Mail told of a similar moment in Brisbane’s landmark Storey Bridge Hotel on Sunday afternoon, a week after the Bali attack. Friends of victim Jodi Cearnes gathered at her favourite watering hole to pray for her recovery. A priest among the group began reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
“The whole pub fell suddenly still,” the Courier-Mail reported, “as not only Jodi’s friends joined in the prayer but hundreds of strangers as well.” Jodi died from her horrific injuries the following Tuesday night—more sorrow; more questions.

Yet even in the midst of these anguished cries, there are the beginnings of answers. When we’re repulsed by such suffering, we’re admitting that this is not how things should be—and perhaps suggest the world as we see and experience it is not all there is to life. When we ask why God wasn’t listening or watching or there, we express our almost subconscious belief that He should have been. When we pray we express a belief—however tentative it may be—that somewhere, somehow, Someone might be listening.

the prayer in the pub
Some might dismiss what happened that Sunday afternoon in the corner bar of the Storey Bridge Hotel as simply an expression of communal grief in a cultural form that might be expected in a society with a historic Christian heritage. But there may well be something more to it than that. Perhaps this form of reaching out to God is an appropriate human response, no matter what the culture or heritage.

The primary significance of the prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer is that it was given by God Himself. But it wasn’t God thundering on an Old Testament mountain and handing down a prayer written in stone for us to obey. It was God in the form of man, Jesus, who lived on this earth as a man, who experienced pain, tragedy, grief and disappointment. As such, the prayer Jesus taught His friends to pray was a prayer specifically fitted to the dual realities of sorrow and hope.

Jesus was God with human feelings. One of the startling features of Jesus’ own sufferings in His crucifixion and death was that this was God questioning and even doubting God. G K Chesterton points to Jesus’ cry from the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, NIV)—and suggest that in all the world’s religions we can find “only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist” (Orthodoxy).

This is the Jesus who gave this prayer to His followers—and to the Christian tradition since—a God who understands our perspective, our deepest heart-wrenching cries.

So when we pray—as the crowd did that Sunday afternoon at the Storey Bridge Hotel—“Your kingdom come, your will be done” (Matthew 6:10), the first component of the prayer is an admission and acknowledgement that God’s kingdom and will are not complete and present realities in our world. In the goodness and beauty we see around us, there are glimpses of these realities, but they are only glimpses—as yet.

As yet—this is the second component of the prayer, the looking and longing for something better. We pray for more of those glimpses, for more of the reality of God’s kingdom and His will to be seen in our lives and in our world. We don’t have to understand everything about God and what our reaching out in this way might mean—it is enough that we do it.

And we also look for an ultimate answer. In response to the question of how the righteous should respond to headlines proclaiming near overwhelming tragedy and evil apparently triumphant, David wrote—and perhaps sang—“The Lord is still in his holy temple; he still rules from heaven. He closely watches everything that happens here on earth… God is good, and he loves goodness; the godly shall see his face” (Psalm 11:4, 7, The Living Bible).

That’s what God was doing here on earth. Jesus was not just here on a fact-finding trip or even a missionary endeavour. He was here to make a way to fix the tragedy and evil in our world. Through His seemingly God-forsaken and shattering death, He paid the incredible price difference between a world gone horribly wrong and a world made new. And He did it because of God’s amazing and overwhelming love for us. Amid the headlines that make up life in our world, that love remains.

When we pray the prayer Jesus taught, whether in a pub, a church or in our hearts, we are—in a way—lodging our vote for that love to reclaim its rightful place as the ruling impulse in our lives and in our world. It is this reality that gives me hope amid the headlines: God still loves us; and somehow God is still in control.

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