One can barely imagine the psychological trauma being experienced, as I write this (Wednesday), by the loved ones of those on board Malaysia Airlines MH370. As is always the case in these terrible situations the desperate search for a media scoop leads to changed stories hour by hour, and anyone awaiting news of an intimate would be less than human if they did not clutch at every tiny sliver of hope amidst the conjecture. A drowning person genuinely does clutch at straws (to the extent they may drown a would-be rescuer). It’s human.
Some of you may have undergone similar terrible experiences to some degree. Almost all of us who were in New Zealand on November 28th, 1979 remember the way in which sketchy details of the Erebus crash were released as the hours went on, yet the wait for discovery of a wreck that night lasted only a few hours. MH370 has now been missing several days, and rumours are abounding.
While the contemporary use of the word “closure” has been around since the early fifteenth century, the word has taken off in popular psychology in the last decade or so. For those awaiting news of MH370 there neither can nor will be closure for a good while yet, and I’m sure your thoughts and prayers are with them, as mine are. Closure is the least we can pray for, now.
But what when prayers remain it seems unanswered? I’m sure I prayed the night of Erebus. I certainly whispered a prayer when I first heard MH370 was missing. I pray frequently for the people of Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine, and the list goes on until my prayers stutter into apparent nothingness. Is this but wasted breath?
There is a part of me that whispers (and spoke out loud at our Wednesday Study Group) that it may well be that situations could be so much worse without us stuttering what I call the “butterfly wing” of prayer. That of course is unprovable, in rational terms, but for those of us who choose to believe six impossible things before breakfast it may have some significance.
But—albeit equally unprovable—I think there is another dimension. If our God, the God of Jesus Christ, is the God of Easter, and if Easter and Good Friday are inseparably linked, then the Resurrection Hope is greater even than Erebus, or MH370, or God help us Syria or Sudan or the myriad hell holes of human experience. This of course would be cold comfort—probably—it I were fleeing chemical weapons in Syria, or fleeing the extreme hatreds of Sudan, but it is the very heart of all we say and do and believe as Christ bearers. “No” is not the final word. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is not the final word.
Into the darkness of the world’s pain we are challenged to keep on whispering Christ-light. It’s not a rational thing. Rational on the other hand can be so passé, and so hope-denying in times of deep despair. It’s sometimes hard, but I’ll stick to the irrational hope in a resurrection greater than death, and continue to whisper prayers for all those devastated by the loss of MH370 somewhere between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing.
