So what's faith got to do with it?

EVEN our very highest church leaders have been led by the awful calamity in South East Asia to publicly question their faith.

"Ours is the agonised cry of Christ in Gethsemane - 'My God, why hast thou forsaken me?'" says the Archbishop of York Dr David Hope in the Evening Press today.

His colleague, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams, was prompted to an equally anguished probing of his own faith in an article in a national newspaper at the weekend.

"Every single random, accidental death is something that should upset a faith bound up with comfort and ready answers," he wrote.

"Faced with the paralysing magnitude of a disaster like this, we naturally feel more deeply outraged - and also more deeply helpless. We can't see how this is going to be dealt with, we can't see how to make it better. The question: "How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?" is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't."

So how do you reconcile the awfulness of what happened - and is still happening, because it is not only the toll of death and destruction but the continuing problems of hunger, of disease, of devastated livelihoods and communities - with the idea of a loving God?

Neither Dr Hope nor Dr Williams are able to offer any easy answers. Prayerfully and purposefully do what we can to help those in need, says Dr Hope.

"The reaction of faith is, or should be, always one of passionate engagement with the lives that are left, a response that asks not for understanding but for ways of changing the situation in whatever - perhaps very small - ways that are open to us," wrote Dr Williams.

Local Christians and people of faith are finding their own ways of coming to terms with the sheer scale and apparently random pointlessness of the event. Here is what they had to say.

The Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope

There is no doubt that the "overwhelming disaster" of the Asian tsunami has raised "serious questions", especially for people of faith, says Dr Hope. "Ours is the agonised cry of Christ in Gethsemane - 'My God why hast thou forsaken me?'"

There can be no slick or easy answers as we struggle to come to terms with the enormity of what has happened, he says.

The task now before us all is "prayerfully and purposefully to do all we can in whatever way we can to assist in the aid and rescue effort".

That includes giving what we can. "York Aid is open to receive donations. Please give generously and sacrificially both as a sign of continuing faith but also of hope and promise for the future for all those whose lives have been so suddenly, and terribly, devastated."

Christian Selvaratnam, member of the congregation at St Michael-le-Belfry Church and North of England director of Christian learning movement the Alpha Course

Christian has relatives in Sri Lanka, and until he heard a couple of days ago that they were OK was naturally worried. "I was immensely relieved to hear that all the family I have are alive and well," he says. "But then I felt guilty because so many other people have died."

There are no glib, pat answers that will provide comfort to people of faith in the face of such an overwhelming, needless tragedy, says Christian. He has met many families struggling to come to terms with their own tragedies - the loss of a loved one, for example - and he has been constantly amazed by the way in which tragedy only affirmed their faith.

"It is not as though they felt their faith was lessened, but as though at that moment the faith they had in God was the most real to them it had ever been. You only know this properly when you sit with families who have lost a son or a wife. They can say they still worship God and yet feel incredibly sad."

He prefers not to talk about the "questioning" of faith, because that is too black or white. It suggests that you either believe or you don't, when in fact the reality of faith is far more complex, he says.

He prefers instead to liken faith to a relationship such as that of marriage.

"I love my wife and I'm immensely committed to her," he says. "She and I would both say there are times when marriage is blissfully wonderful. But there are other times when it is more hard.

"I wouldn't say at those times that I was questioning marriage. I would say we may be going through a difficult patch. Often you have to go through these difficult patches."

For his own Christian relatives in Sri Lanka, the answer to the question of how their faith has been affected by the tragedy is a simple one. "They see their role now as being to help others," he says.

Dr Chris Maunder, Roman Catholic theologian at York St John College

Faith is never easy, says Dr Maunder. The question of how to reconcile a loving God with a world that can be cruel and unjust, one in which awful things happen to good people, is one that Christians have grappled with for centuries.

There are many answers, he says.

One which comes from quite early in the Christian tradition is that in this life we are being tested.

"The circumstances are difficult on Earth, and we are being tested in terms of how we respond to those circumstances, and how we maintain our faith. The theological position is that all this is to be seen in the light of something eternal. All world religions have the same perspective, that this world is not the final world."

For him, more challenging than asking whether or not God exists is the question of how we deal with the problems of the world. "How do I live in safety, fairly comfortably, in a world where people are starving to death still?" he says. "That's an agonising question, and one that can never be fully answered."

The Asian tsunami threw that question into sharp relief, he says - but it is still not a new question. Many of those who died lived in conditions of great poverty, as do many others around the world.

"The issues for me were there before Boxing Day 2004. They have only been worsened and deepened by this tragedy.

"The answer for many people is that God is calling us to help people on a global level. We have to respond to God's call and make sure we do our best to make the lives of other people better. That for me is what it is all about."

Andy Scaife, agnostic Quaker

To Andy, God is not some great, supreme being who exists outside ourselves. Rather, he or she or it is the "human spirit" of generosity and humanity within each and every one of us - what Quakers call "the God that is within us all".

"I find that more affirmed than disproved by recent events," he says. "It is affirmed to me that we are not in control of natural phenomena and of the planet we live on."

Tragic though the events in South Asia are, the tsunami for him raises other issues. Yes, we should clearly be doing all we can to help those affected by the catastrophe. But we should remember that it is essentially something over which we had no control. There are many other calamities of our own making

"The number of people killed in the tsunami is the same as the number of people killed on roads on the planet every year," he says. "That is a tsunami of our own making every year.

"Really, what we human beings should get from this is a remembrance that we need to be more careful, we need to try to reduce deaths that we have control over, be it from pollution, road safety or war."

Updated: 11:30 Thursday, January 06, 2005