CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: ‘What kind of God allows these things?’
Inverness-based artist Dot Walker is renowned for her landscapes, expressing on canvas the loveliness abundant in nature. The image she recently posted on her Dot Walker Art Facebook page is different.
It’s a delicate charcoal portrait of a young girl, capturing in sorrow and love, eyes wide-open with terror, lips pursed in apprehension.
It depicts a real child whose face, glimpsed on Al Jazeera news, ‘really haunted’ the artist. This girl’s anguish resonates especially with Dot because she worked in Palestine in her 20s, and found there nothing but welcome and kindness. Such haunted faces can be seen wherever there is war.
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‘What kind of world, lets children grow up seeing more violence and trauma in a year than anyone should ever see in 100 lifetimes?’ Dot asks.
It doesn’t surprise us that the sensitivity which sees and recreates the essence of landscapes should also be moved to record a powerful image like this.
So many of us share Dot’s anguish - torn between the loveliness around us, the family joy we hope to share at Christmas and the dark stain of suffering which breaks hearts and minds and bodies.
Dot, as a Christian, might also have said: ‘What kind of God allows these things?’ It’s good to ask tough questions rather than compartmentalising our lives and living with the false security of an unquestioned faith. For it is as we wrestle with the questions that we become real.
I wonder about the pain of being God. The Creator who imagined our planet into being with great, exuberant brush-strokes only to see a shadow cast across the face of the Earth, a protester’s pot of sombre paint flung at the canvas. If we feel pain at what we see, how much more must the God suffer who knows intimately each frightened heart, each trembling face?
Yet God does not burn the canvas and begin again. Christians believe that ultimately the canvas will be fully restored, the shadow dispelled by the same light which flooded the empty tomb where Jesus had been buried.
But, desperately, we need something now. An assurance that God is good, that God is doing something now, that the light has not been utterly extinguished.
We discover that God calls each human being to be light in the darkness, using the gifts God gives us moment by moment to create beauty in whichever ways we can. Words, hugs, tears, practical help, compassionate giving, kindness, songs, prayers and positive thoughts, poems, cakes, gentleness, prophetic art like that terrified wee face Dot records.
All these things prompt us to become truly human, as God works on restoring the canvas with the flickering candle-flames of our love.
