TURNING TO GOD IN THE FACE OF CATACLYSM

 *TURNING TO GOD IN THE FACE OF CATACLYSM*

Some have recognized the present crisis as a moment for spiritual reflection and renewal. The following is excerpted from a remarkable March 26,2020, Wall Street Journal article "A Coronavirus Great Awakening?" by Robert Nicholson, director of a nonprofit organization for Christian advocacy in the Middle East, it reminds us that at times like this we should turn to God and seek His will.

"Could a plague of biblical proportions be America's or Nigeria's best hope for religious revival? As the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, there is reason to think so ... Gazing at the ruins (of that war) from his window at Cambridge University, British historian Herbert Butterfield chose to make sense of it by turning to the Hebrew Bible.

"'The power of the Old Testament teaching on history ... lay precisely in the region of truths which sprang from a reflection on catastrophe and cataclysm,' Butterfield wrote in 'Christianity and History' (1949). 'It is almost impossible properly to appreciate the higher developments in the historical reflection of the Old Testament except in another age which has experienced (or has found itself confronted with) colossal cataclysm'.

"Americans (then), chastened by the horrors of war, turned to faith in search of truth and meaning ... Today the world faces another moment of cataclysm. Though less devastating than World War II, the pandemic has remade everyday life and wrecked the global economy in a way that feels apocalyptic.

"The experience is new and disorienting. Life had been deceptively easy until now. Our ancestors' lives, by contrast, were guaranteed to be short and painful ... We reduced nature to 'the shackled form of a conquered monster,' as Joseph Conrad once put it, and took control of our fate. God became irrelevant.

"Who will save us now that the monster has broken free?...

"Butterfield wrote (further)... 'We of the twentieth century have been particularly spoiled... all our ancestors... betray in their philosophy and their outlook a terrible awareness of the chanciness of human life, and the precarious nature of man's existence in this risky universe'...

"The pandemic has humbled the country and opened millions of eyes to this risky universe once more.

"Sheer grimness of suffering brings men sometimes into a profounder understanding of human destiny,' Butterfield wrote. Sometimes 'it is only by a cataclysm,' he continued,' that man can make his escape from the net which he has taken so much trouble to weave around himself.'

"For societies founded on the biblical tradition, cataclysms need not mark the end. They are a call for repentance and revival... Great struggle can produce great clarity.

"The ancient Hebrews... turned their tragedy, turned their very helplessness, into one of the half-dozen creative moments in world history,' Butterfield wrote. 'It would seem that one of the clearest and most concrete of the facts of history is the fact that *men of spiritual resources may not only redeem catastrophe, but turn it into a grand creative moment.'*

"Could a rogue virus lead to a grand creative moment in Nigeria's history? Will Nigerians, shaken by the reality of a risky universe, rediscover the God who proclaimed himself sovereign over every catastrophe?"

*Copyright 2020*

*The Ecumenican Church Nigeria*