We can protect God’s goodness at all costs which usually takes the form of suggesting that we just can not understand God’s ways but if we did we would grasp why God in His infinite wisdom would allow such disasters. Our role is to submit to the mystery of suffering and continue to have faith in God’s goodness. (Traditionalists love this position, as in theory they tend to see humility and surrender as the central virtues of the spiritual personality while this position drives religious liberals and secular people crazy as they tend to see autonomy as a central virtue of a “spiritually’ mature person. Of course both exaggerate the truth of their own psycho-spiritual predispositions and need to integrate the truth of the other side.)

Another version of this “protect God’s goodness” position is expressed by explaining that God sets up nature and then sits back allowing the world to work its natural course and if we simply used all our knowledge and God-given ability we would better understand nature and be better able to protect ourselves from natural disasters. (This position – a rational spirituality - works well with public policy critics who note that had the engineering corps done its job and had money allocated to protect New Orleans from just these sorts of “natural” disasters actually been used to do so the levees would have held back the flood waters and we would not be talking about this today.)

Sometimes, to protect God’s beneficence, more “radical” theologians suggest limiting God’s omnipotence – better a weakened God who is good than an all-powerful God who seems so nasty. This is the God who is always on our side, as we understand our side, and is present not on the allowing tragedy to happen side but where people are courageously and sacrificially working to alleviate pain and suffering. (Liberal theologians and good pastoral religious leaders find this view appealing and comforting.)

Of course there is the more aggressive response that defends God’s honor. This is the intuition (much like Job’s friends) that the reason for disasters like hurricane Katrina is that God is punishing a city and country that have so lost themselves in sin that only a devastating flood can get people’s attention to “straighten” out - generally the purveyors of this explanation know precisely the sin being punished which is usually sexual in nature. Yes, tragically innocent people are caught up in the punishment but that is the price good people pay for being in a society like Sodom. (Sadly, it seems to be less than rare these days, the people who most vehemently offer this explanation are engaged in the very behavior they believe is so sinful making the theology suspect.)

Each of these explanations does capture a truth about the human experience whatever one believes about God. Yes, there is an inscrutability to what happens to us that it behooves us to accept at times or we will drive ourselves crazy. And it is true that many natural disasters could indeed be avoided if we actually did what we knew needed to be done to protect ourselves but didn’t whether out of greed, incompetence or negligence. And it is also true that it is pastorally far more comforting to tell a person that God is crying with them than that God is punishing them or that there is a good reason God has allowed this tragedy that we just do not understand. And it is surely true that as a community our fates are tied together and that we are far more interdependent than we usually allow ourselves to believe.

I am pretty pragmatic when it comes to talking about this God – I use whichever theology works to help me and those around me live more hopefully and act more compassionately in the face of tragedy. Each of these perspectives has deep roots in the great religious traditions because they do capture an aspect of our experience. The key is not to fool ourselves into believing one of these traditional explanations simply because we think it is authentic and then wind up becoming bitter, resentful and angry. And it is also not so spiritually wise to believe something simply on authority if it contradicts our own, seriously attended to, inner experience and leads us to rationalize God and hurt other human beings.

Of course there is the possibility that the question dissolves once we realize it presumes an image of God that may no longer capture God in a way adequate to our experience. This says nothing about God just but about our limited ability to capture our experience of what we call God. All images or metaphors (including the word God) attempting to render an ineffable experience are necessary and even noble, sacred projections that hide as much as they reveal and to confuse an image with God with God or to make any image a literal and exhaustive representation of God is the classic definition of idolatry. Descriptions of God should never be confused with God anymore than the description of passionate love making should be confused with making love. In this respect, the great contribution of our contemporary atheists is not that they don’t believe in God rather they remind us that the common images we use to describe God are always limited and partial, often times ineffective, and sometimes actually die as mediators. Do not have any graven images!

Once we let go of the conventional image of God as some voyeuristic peeping Tom, Father in Heaven, who controls things like a super CEO King, who if we would just did the right thing would reward us with a good life, the problem of how does God allow disasters like Katrina stops being a problem. God isn’t some Great Man controlling the weather based on some mysterious moral calculation of our behavior. In all honesty, such a God seems more like the Wizard of Oz.

For me, God is a code word for Reality experienced as Unbounded, Spacious, Radiant, Vast, Open, Transparent, a Luminous Clarity in which I am part of a vast seamless system of dynamic, flowing, mutually interpenetrating processes that includes all of us in a radiant sweep, an unqualifiable radically all- inclusive Consciousness of Light, Love, and Life. In this altered state which spiritual practice has helped me, if ever so rarely experience, and which sometimes unexpectedly just happens the question of God allowing anything simply does not arise - there is no allowing or not allowing - there is simply the Is-ness of each moment beyond space and time and tears and terror. This is the God that my tradition names Ein Sof which literally means “There is No End” and which the mystic poets of the Bible call YHWH from the Hebrew root Becoming. I know I have tasted this when in the face of Katrinas I find my consciousness stretching beyond my narrow self-interest, fears and need to justify some image of God I no longer believe in and I feel compelled to widen my circle of care and compassion beyond my comfort zone and instead of asking about God I god.