Thinking About Samoa

Hopefully, this isn't going to be a second post on the same topic. I did a blog last night, punched the button, and voila! Into the black hole of cyberspace. So, I guess I'll try again.

I was asked to go to Samoa to conduct trauma counselling after the tsunami. It was an interesting experience to say the least. Some of the people I counselled had lost family members and homes and friends. The loss wasn't confined to Samoans, it embraced New Zealanders, Brits, Aussies, and others.

As I worked with the people, I heard lots of speculations.

Three weeks before the tsunami, they say an apparition of The Virgin Mary appeared on the back of the Aggie Grey's Hotel gift shop. Some claim there was black text prophesying a future catastrophe. I went out to see the image. The only other time I'd seen anything close to a 'divine apparition' was when the paint started peeling off my grandmother's fireplace surround, leaving behind a rather wonky looking picture of something that could, with the right kind of squint focus, look like Jesus.

All I saw on the back of the building was a water stain. No squinting could bring the Virgin to life.

Some of the people I spoke with are clinging to God the same way their their relatives clutched any solid object that would keep them from being pulled out to sea.

A lot of the peoples' faith is being tested during this time.Samoa is a 'religious' nation. God is a staple along with the coconut cream and the taro chips. I don't say that in jest, it's just that God is part of the warp and weave of the Samoan life fabric.

'Why would God allow this to happen to Samoa?' A matai (chief)asked me. 'Why would he let good people who have been doing good all their lives be washed away?' He'd lost three nieces, and his wife hadn't spoken since the day they disappeared. He was in deep shock. 'I don't understand.'

I certainly had no answers. I tend to believe that earthquakes and tsunamis are geological events. If I start thinking that God did it, then I have to answer all those gnarly questions that make my brain spin, or I have to read the book of Job, and I still won't have answers,and all I'll have is a crisis of faith. I've had enough of those, thank you.

Others figured that God was punishing the resorts for not closing on Sundays. The petulant deity had just washed them away to prove a point. The people I worked with were too fragile for me to point out to them that I had seen that at least two churches had been demolished, and many believers who did go to church on Sundays had perished.

A few thought it was God's way of preparing the people for future events. How can anyone be prepared for a wave that rises up out of the sea in three minutes, and then sweeps across everything in its path, then does it again and again? A victim said that it was like being in a washing machine that had sheet metal, nails, bricks, animals, wood, and all sorts of things in it, a machine that kept agitating and rolling.

I asked myself, 'What is our response as Christians to this event?'

One of the hotel Operations Managers went through every room at the hotel and stripped the mini bars of water and took them out to the people at Lalomanu. She also took sheets, ferried people, allowed people to camp out in the lobby of the hotel, and I suspect, she fed them. A bank in Apia took clothing, umbrellas to protect from the heat, water and food out to one of the sites. A High Commission person took in the family of some of the deceased New Zealanders and tenderly ministered to them in the loss of their loved ones. Samoans took in their families and fed them, washed their wounds, and now they wait for the healing to come. Heart, body, mind, spirit, nation.

To me, it all looked like the image of God in action. A case of 'if you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.'

I don't have a point to this blog, I just wanted to say that while I didn't see The Virgin Mary in Samoa, I am certain that I saw her son manifest in the most amazing ways.