Positive Loss and Tragic Memory: On the Preservation of Community

Niels Henrik Gregersen

Abstract: During the past 50 years, the field of disaster studies has moved away from the so-called dominating paradigm that perceives disaster as exceptional events towards a vulnerability paradigm that views disasters as expressing the over-all fragility of human societies. In current disaster research, this paradigm is extending into a resilience paradigm that focusses on how societies and human beings may respond to disasters by building up resilience on a number of levels—from changing the ecological landscape to personal and communal resilience. Resilience is about “bouncing back” by precautionary and self-adaptive responses to disasters. In what follows, I argue that all three paradigms hold legitimacy depending on what problems are most urgent. A theology of disaster has to recognize the unforeseen and exceptional alongside human exposure to vulnerability, while at the same time engaging in the formation of human and religious resilience. Disaster studies raise a set of new questions to theology. Conversely, what may theology add to the palette of disaster studies? What kinds of theology—if any—are meaningful in the face of disaster and tragedy, and what aspects of religious resilience makes sense, even from a secular perspective

Key Terms: disaster studies; tragedy; religious resilience; community of living and dead.

Reflecting on 9/11 2001 and other terrorist threats to Western societies, Donald Rumsfeld, the former Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, made a now famous statement:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.i

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One may disagree with Rumsfeld on his political decisions but his quip about knowledge and ignorance is perceptive, also relating to natural hazards and social disasters: There are the known knowns—the things we know. There are the known unknowns—the things we know that we do not know enough about. Finally, there are the unknown unknowns—the things we do not even know that we do not know about. It is reasonable to understand this categorization in the sense that there are infinitely more in the third category (the unknown unknowns) than in the second category (the known unknowns). Not only is knowledge is always inherently limited but the more we know, the more we become aware of the limits of knowledge.

Balloons of Knowledge and the Arrival of the Unexpected

Knowledge is much like inflating a balloon—the larger our balloon of knowledge becomes with the progress of science and other knowledge-producing achievements, the larger is the surface of the balloon towards everything we know that we do not know about. Certainly, about the past and present we know many bits and pieces, and we have theories of the future with some predictive power at a general level as well. The devil, however, lies in the details—in the particular circumstances, on which we apply our generalized theories. After all, we live in “a dappled world”, as phrased by philosopher Nancy Cartwright.ii If one thing is certain, it is that our concrete futures are uncertain. If anything reveals the unknown unknowns, it is the future.

Disasters lie on the boundary between the unforeseeable and the predictable. Fortunately, volcanos and earthquakes are no longer completely unpredictable yet their exact outbursts, and how they unfold in time and space, are. An example is the Tohoku earthquake that took place in the deep waters outside Japan on March 11th 2011, 2.46 pm, measured 9.0 on the Richter scale. Japan is a high-tech society that anticipated the risk of tsunamis. Around the Fukushima nuclear plant, 5.7 meter high protection walls had been built, but the waves hitting Fukushima 50 minutes after the earthquake were between 13 and 15 meters. In part because of the size of the earthquake, in part due to the alternating hard and soft offshore soil conditions, which the scientific models had not taken into account. Here was something that even the best research in the field of disaster management did not know that it did not know about.

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NaTech and NaPol Disasters

Fukushima shows how even the highest organized and technologically advanced societies—like the Japanese—can be hit by disasters. Even though the disaster originated in natural events beyond human control, the subsequent disaster was largely made in Japan. At the same time, it is also evident that Fukushima has changed the Japanese society. Made in Japan, but also making Japan—and a number of other high-tech societies. Even the German nuclear industry faced a gradual shutdown as a consequence of Fukushima.

The fact that disasters are not only exceptional points to the fundamental vulnerability of selves and societies. Even though physical structures underlie most disasters, they unfold as compounds of natural forces and social conditions. Most disasters today are what scholars around the Copenhagen University program on “Changing Disasters” call NaTech Disasters. Fukushima is just one example of such hybrid phenomenon.

Similarly, we may speak of about NaPol Disasters—disasters that reach terrifying extents not least because of lack of political judgment, cultural awareness and sufficient infrastructure. The hurricane Kathrina, August 2005—causing widespread destruction along the Gulf coast from central Florida to Texas, and destroying major parts of New Orleans—exemplifies a failure of political leadership in an otherwise advanced society such as the US. In his book with the ironic title Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disasters in America, published in 2006, Ted Steinberg has described the course of events in detail. President Bush and his staff denied climate change, and the technical confidence in the current flood defences was too large for the government to react properly, and in time. When the government finally did issue an evacuation, it did not take into account that the larger part of the poor population had no means of transportation, nor the fact the busses and trains had stopped operating. The result was 1836 casualties and 81.2 billion dollars of damage. The lesson is that even though natural disasters happen, and happen more frequently than before, it makes a difference whether the political leadership acts in time. iii

Towards a Phenomenologically Sensitive Theology of Disaster

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In general, disaster studies attempt to understand and theoretically predict the life cycles of disasters (from their initial phases to their unfolding as disasters), but disaster studies also serve to improve practical interventions (from preparatory measures to practical aid in the aftermath of disasters). Yet disasters studies should also comprise reflections on how to live with disasters from a human perspective, that is, from the perspective both victims and survivors, knowing well that both survivors and aid workers are hit by disasters, and will have to live with scars, wounds, and losses.

This essay only offers a modest attempt to address the latter question: How do we live with disasters, and with all the tragedies felt and witnessed? In particular, what might a phenomenologically sensitive theology, that is, a theology attending to first-person experiences, have to say in the chord with other humanitarian thinkers? In what follows, I’ll foreground the potential resources within Christian theology for addressing the issue of religious resilience rather than the addressing the wider scope of cultural disaster studies.

The Disaster as an Interference Phenomenon

The term catastrophe means something like a ‘downward turn’ (from classic Greek, kata-strophein). In modern languages, the word is usually connected to the experience of a major disaster that strikes with an unpredictable suddenness, and has radically destructive consequences for a society as whole. In English, the word disaster is more commonly used. It comes from Latin and refers to an unfortunate constellation of stars (dis-aster). Stripped of its astrological background, the term captures the fact the disasters has to do with a number of constellations—from atmospheric conditions to the soil conditions of the oceans to the way society are structured, including how human communities prefer to live, even under vulnerable conditions—near the coastline, for example. Disasters arise out of interferences between a large number of natural processes and a wider set human necessities and cultural preferences.

In classic disaster studies a disaster is an event “concentrated in time and space” by which a society “is hit by losses of its members and of its physical conditions that the social structure is torn down”. Thus goes E. Fritz’ classic definition.iv In English, we have a distinction between states of emergency and disastrous events, whereas catastrophe is reserved only for very deep and

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comprehensive disasters. Such categorizations are helpful for the public media when the destructive events are to be described in general terms – for the sake of orientation, and for the sake of being able to apply emergency aid in the most appropriate way. After all, the size of the disaster does make a difference.

To the victims of disaster, however, and to those working among and for the disaster survivors, such categorizations seem somehow superficial. What escapes the numeric perspective is the inside experience of disaster. This participatory perspective is central to theology, but ought, I think, hold a more significant position in disaster studies in general. Even when a disaster is concentrated in time and space (an earthquake, a tsunami, a terrorist attack) it is always a disaster to somebody who are the victims. The disaster can’t be perceived as a physical event in time and space only, without also understanding it as a radically transforming personal and social event. The disaster hits you or me. The catastrophe happens to them, or to us.

When a large meteorite struck Siberia in 2013, it set off a number of severe physical events. Had the meteorite struck near Moscow, we would have called it a disaster, or even a catastrophe, because it would have claimed numerous casualties. Thus, disasters are relational phenomena that arise in the interaction between nature and society.

Disaster and Tragedy

Let me introduce a phenomenological distinction, that is, a distinction sensitive to typical aspects inherent in the involved first-person perspective. Every disaster carries tragedies with it. There is good reason, however, for attending to the difference between the two terms. I propose the following distinction:

A tragedy is a personal loss with severe social consequences. A disaster is a loss that strikes wider parts of a society but carries many

personal tragedies along with it.

When large bales of straw fell down upon and killed three playing children in the small Danish town Hee in July 2012, it was a tragedy with drastic consequences for the family—the 42-year old mother of the children died only 10 months later. The rest of the family has to live with this tragedy, with scars and wounds that will never

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heal. In a sense, it belongs to the nature of tragedy that the wounds will not and should ever be expected to heal. Tragic memory respects, and should respect, the intensity of the deeply felt loss. The world goes on, but the world will no longer experienced as the same.

A disaster, by contrast, strikes a society as a whole. The disaster cannot be seen as a sheer natural event, not even when it arises out of natural phenomena such as earthquakes and tsunamis, volcanoes and meteorites. Natural disasters are hybrid phenomena because they strike society and its members, and because they in their effects cross the boundaries between nature and culture. A disaster is, as said, an interference phenomenon that interrupts the normal course of life. A disaster comes in between us and the world is as it was and is, so that nothing goes on, as it used to do.

The tragedy is heart-breaking, even as the world around it looks just as it used to. This dissonance between personal experience and the external world is part of the experience of tragedy. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the protagonist is all alone with his confined anger against his uncle, King Claudius, who had killed his father, with his love-anger ambivalence towards his mother, who had married the new king, and his grief over his beloved father, the legitimate King, who had been killed by his brother, Hamlet’s uncle. The tragic lies in his clear knowledge of the betrayed father, and in the fact that he was nonetheless regarded as a mad man in the court. Hamlet’s inner ambivalence, and the irrational need for an outlet of his anger, is expressed in the scene where Hamlet stabs Polonius, his mother’s servant, through the arras with the words, “I must be cruel only to be kind” (Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4, line 162).

In other cases, the problem of tragedy is that that there are no one else to blame. How could one blame the bales of straw, or the play of children? The anger of tragedy has no easy relief target, apart from one self, perhaps, and then, of course, destiny, or God. Yet, the world goes on as if nothing had happened. Apart from the irredeemable loss this is the sting of tragedy that stays. No outsider can step into the role as the one who understands from the inside out. For who understands the tragedy apart from the one that has suffered the loss him- or herself? Part of the tragedy (devoid of theories of nemesis, and the like) is this experience of radical loneliness.

By contrast, a disaster is terrible because nothing remains as it was before, and everybody knows. A tragedy is paralyzing, because the personal loss is

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unbearable, whereas a disaster is paralyzing due to its physical and social immensity too. Society—or, a great part of it—is broken down. How can something new be build up from the external ruins and inner scars? How is it possible to ‘survive’ a disaster even when counted among the survivors? How go back home and resume ordinary life after having been in the midst of the disaster as humanitarian aid worker—having provided only whatever little help possible?v

Positive Losses and Negative Losses

What I have done so far is to delineate typical contours of that which is experienced in tragedy and disaster as something absolutely out of bounds, abnormal and uninvited. What I want to do now is to point to the notions of what it means to live a good life – the life that is now totally ruined and interrupted. Often enough, philosophers describe the world in normalcy as a life in mediocrity. In Sein und Zeit (1928), Heidegger described the life of das Man in pejorative terms, just as Robert Nozick, in The Examined Life (1989), is critical of the unexamined life prior to any particular evaluation of it. Yet it seems to me that what is longed for by victims of tragedies and disasters is no more than simply life as it was, good enough in itself, not needing much apart from some extra time of natural maturation and discovery. I even want to argue that it is only against the background of experiences of a life worth living that the terrifying experiences of tragedy and disaster are felt as unbearable. No experience takes place in a vacuum, and no experience of the intrusion of evil is possible without a prior sense of feeling at home in the world, knowing well that the world is far from perfect, and neither were necessarily those that are now so achingly missed.

In his recent book, Flourishing: Why we need Religion in a Globalized World , theologian Miroslav Volf writes on the concept of what it means to life a good life in the major world religions. He makes a distinction between three formal components, (a), “life being led well”, which requires some internal discernment, (b) “life going well”, which presupposes at least some proficient external conditions, and (c) “life feeling good”, such as joy.vi The ideals and norms of the five world religions are different so they cannot be compacted into a substantial agreement, nonetheless they are internally related to one another in the search for goodness and authenticity.

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In Volf’s lecture at The Faculty of Theology of Copenhagen University on May 6, 2016, “Time, Eternity, and the Prospects for Care” (yet unpublished), he discussed how the concept of the good life is reflected also in experiences of loss. In this context, he proposed the concept of “positive loss” as intrinsic to human existence, examined or not. His example was indeed very mundane: Think of the flavor of a good red wine that we sniff, and catch, as it were, in the air. Imagine that the aroma was only growing gradually ending up filling out the whole room so that nothing else could be smelled. Indeed, that would be a bad flavor.

This concept of positive loss is important in more existential matters as well. Many things we experience as losses, as when children stop being children, but the loss of childhood is also a positive loss. Similarly, the loss of being a teenager is a positive loss (not only to the parents but usually also to the youngsters themselves). There are other less obvious examples of positive loss. Many modern Westerners, particular among educated people, feel it is difficult to go on retirement; nonetheless, it is possible to reap something from the new situation that was not previously possible. Growing older is usually described as a negative loss of agility, social importance, and future opportunities, but growing older can also be taken as an avenue for finally becoming mature and less self-concerned. As the German philosopher Wilhelm Schmid argues, Gelassenheit is what we win by growing older.vii However, just as gradual impairment will close more opportunities than wanted, the prosaic story of death and dying will put an absolute end to any such forwards-oriented reaping. Therefore, positive losses do not immediately balance the negative losses in the case of premature impairments, and in the ordinary lives coming closer to an end. In this sense, also ordinary life lingers on the tragic, and is usually experienced as such, perhaps more often by onlookers than by the one experiencing death coming close. If anything, this shows that our human biology is not only what puts limitations and, in the end, a full-stop to a life worth living. Apart from a few deceases (such as ALS, known as the decease of Stephen Hawking), there is such entanglement between spiritual longings and bodily structure that the mind is gradually changed along with the decease, rather than “fighting against the decease”. There is not only warfare between mind and body but also an intimacy insofar as living and dying relates both to body and mind. Death is not always experienced as a foe but many also be seen as a friend. Perhaps it no coincidence that the fact of dying can be termed a coup de grace, that a delivery from a life no longer worth living.

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Tragic memory and the loss of community

Why speak about positive goods – the life worth living – and about positive and negative losses in the context of disasters and tragedy? For the following reasons: It is only against the background of a good, normal, ordinary, and even sometimes also mediocre life, that one can understand the abruptness of tragedy and disaster appropriately.

Losing a child (young or grown-up) is categorically different from a child losing its own childhood. Apart from the grief and despair of losing a child, there was a child who lost its life and who should have been growing up, becoming a teenager, in short, extending his or her relations beyond family and near friendship, in a search for a further experiencing of the life worth living beyond childhood. All is lost, not only to parents, but also to the child.

Tragic losses remain tragic, also when remembered. A too facile request for a recovery from states of grief and sorrow is inhuman. The death of a child remains a tragedy, also despite the fact that the child, even if short-lived, had its own share of the good life worth living, exactly as a child, being already a full person in its own value and right. Not only has a member of the family been lost forever in this world, tragic is also the loss of the child’s life-bearing relations to other people, and for all, to its own future. Children are no less relational beings than their grown-up parents, the difference is, in this respect, only that a fuller compass of the child’s relations has not been developed—neither the self-relations of the child (whatever significance we accord to self-reflection) nor its relations to the wider world. We here see that tragedy is not only about individuals but about community, and about the sense of losing community.

So far, I have been speaking in a tone of voice that may be shared by believers as well as unbelievers. I do this as a theologian out of the conviction that what is normally considered secular, and what is considered religious or spiritual, does neither constitute two different things nor two separate “worlds”, but constitutes one undivided phenomenon, having to do with experiences of flourishing and vulnerability in a shared human condition.

It’s time for theologians to develop post-secular forms of theological reasoning which stays within the domain of shared humanity, showing the openness of shared experiences for religious interpretation, whilst been attentive to diverging

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routes of a more confined secular approach to life, and a more encompassing religious view of reality that goes deeper and beyond mundane experiences of ordinary life.viii For example, if the preservation of community is the central problem of negative loss and tragic experiences, the spiritual question is whether there is also a recovery of community possible beyond that of a mere remembrance of those who have passed away by the survivors. It is at this point that the particular concept of a religious resilience comes up in relation to experiences of tragedy. Before addressing this issue, however, I wish to point to aspects of current disaster research that moves beyond the internal existential perspective of the phenomenological approach.

From Vulnerability to Resilience

Within the past ten years of disaster studies, there has been some observable change from the vulnerability paradigm towards a resilience paradigm. This can be seen in a large number of scientific articles, from environmental and urban planning to the reports of the UN.ix The UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction defines resilience as “the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions.” The report defines its lead concept as follows: “Resilience means the ability to ‘resile from’ or ‘spring back from’ a shock. The resilience of a community in respect to potential hazard events is determined by the degree to which the community has the necessary resources and is capable of organizing itself both prior to and during times of need.”x

The UN-report mentions natural systems, larger societal formations and smaller communities, which are all victims of disasters. The perspective is thus largely that of organizational sociology; accordingly, the report it leaves out cultural, psychological, and religious factors. Yet the paradigms of social science are normative, too—even though they appear to be purely descriptive. When a community is seen as vulnerable, it calls for an engagement to heal the wounds. When there is talk of resilience, it calls for the restoration of the society struck by a disaster thus overcoming the chock through self-organization.

It is tempting to understand the relationship between vulnerability and resilience as to sides of the same coin. Vulnerability points to the problem, resilience

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to the practical solutions to the problem. It is not that simple, though. The strength of the vulnerability paradigm is that it points out the existing inequalities in the distribution of vulnerability, and hence the lack of political will to care for those who are most at risk. In theology, the vulnerability paradigm therefore finds its advocates in particular among political theologians. The sense of injustice in the distribution of good and evil continues to hold legitimacy.

At the same time, it is problematic to view poor people and underdeveloped countries solely as victims. They too are individuals and communities that can make a difference. The vulnerability paradigm shows where the need for aid is most pressing, but it does not reveal anything about how the vulnerability may be reduced and perhaps even overcome with the resources already present within the communities themselves. The strength of the resilience paradigm is that those who suffer are seen as something more than victims. They are individuals and part of communities that actively contribute in the restoration of society. Aid from the outside is seen here as help that makes self-help possible in the long run.

In the concept of resilience lies a certain element of flexibility and plasticity that goes beyond the bare ability of perseverance. Resilience is more than resistance. Resilient systems are willing to adapt, resistant systems are unwilling to adapt. The power of resilience lies in the capability to adapt in confrontation with disasters—in being able to absorb and adjust to the changing conditions and at the same time restore and preserve the essential functions and structures (cf. the UN definition). As such, resilience is both a descriptive concept (how to handle insecurity and critical conditions) and a normative concept that prompts due care and diligence in the societies that are frequently struck by disaster.xi This normative feature comes to the fore when disaster studies engage in practical guidelines for the dos and don’ts in disaster scenarios.

Calling for an Interdisciplinary Broadening of Disaster Studies

The question is whether the concept of resilience can be used as a prism to talk about a religious resilience. This question is necessary, because disaster studies since the 1950s has been defined as a purely social scientific paradigm led by organizational sociologists. Elsewhere I have pointed out the need to confront the way too narrow scope in prevailing disaster studies.xii

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On the one hand, disaster studies have neglected the contributions of the natural sciences to the understanding of the causes of disasters in natural processes that are not created by human beings—and that are here to stay (volcanos, earthquakes, meteorites, etc.). While it is correct to say that modern society has initiated disastrous events (cutting down the rain forest, CO2 emissions, etc.), it is wrong to assume that all disasters are man-made. Through millions of years, the tectonic plates underlying the continents have moved and shifted thus causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis, just as large meteorites have multiple times made highly developed forms of life become extinct. Geographers and evolutional biologists talk about The Big Five Extinctions, and the last one of those occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out to give room for the ascendency of mammalian rather than reptilian life forms.

On the other hand, disaster studies have neglected the importance of culture and religion. Cultural factors make a difference in the way societies respond to the dangers of natural disasters and to the risks we incur on ourselves, knowingly or unknowingly. It is therefore crucial that anthropologists, theologians, and humanists actively enter the field of disaster studies. As Dara Nix-Stevenson has pointed out, social capital, in the sense of a society’s willingness to help others, is crucial for how to overcome disastrous consequences—also when the humanitarian aid workers have left the disaster setting: ”social capital is a key factor in moving toward a culture of disaster prevention and risk reduction and (…) social capital can generate both the conditions necessary for mutual support and care and the mechanisms required for communities and groups to exert effective pressure to influence public policy.”xiii Gradually, disaster studies are in the process of acknowledging the importance of cultural resources and social capital for a disaster recovery. But what about religion?

The Relevance of Religion for Disaster Research What is the connection between the disaster and religion? At least two features should be mentioned that both testify to the importance of religious factors for disaster research. The first is the simple observation that 84 % of the world’s population, according to a Pew Foundation poll from 2012, defines itself in religious terms.xiv Since human beings are “self-interpreting animals” (as formulated by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor), the majority of people do interpret disasters

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in religious terms – one way or another—and the call for religious rituals have not been smaller today than in previous centuries. Over the centuries, and no less in the twentieth and twenty-first century—disasters have continued to elicit religious disaster responses.xv Even so-called “secular” cultures turn out to be “post-secular” in the sense that secular and religious viewpoints are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but work in tandem, often seen as supplementing one another rather than competing with one another, not least in urban contexts.xvi

The second observation is sheer fact that Christian churches are among the biggest and most effective to organize the help to communities hit by disasters.xvii One can only hope that the motivation for organizing for organizing help to all people, regardless of faith, will continue, and that it will be matched by similar efforts from humanist and secular parts of the world.

Beyond the “Act of God” Theologies

Unfortunately, the inherited English term for a force majeure is an Act of God. This concept is employed on a regular basis by insurance agencies and governments when they declare that a situation was caused by something that lies beyond the control of human beings. In this context, it belongs to the task of theologians and ministers to break down the false syllogism that because the disaster was not caused by human beings, it was caused by an especially designed form of divine punishment.

Until the 1900s this idea is widespread even among kind-hearted evangelical theologians. After the great earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 (at the time Lisbon was Europe’s 4th largest city), the Lutheran Pietist Hans Adolf Brorson wrote a long and sweeping poem about “The Pitiful Fall of Lisbon by Earthquake” (Lissabons ynkelige Undergang ved Jordskælv). In this poem he described how the earthquake was God’s punishment of the papists and their infidelity. Similarly, John Wesley wrote an even longer publication in 1755 called “Some Serious Thought Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon” in which he castigated how Lisbon’s well-off lived a life of luxury while the Roman Inquisition flayed the poor creatures they interrogated. Now the roles had been reversed: “Is there indeed a God that judges the world? And is he now making inquisition for blood?”, he asked. Wesley believed the answer was a loud and resounding yes.xviii

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This Act of God-theology is a repertoire in Christian theology that never deserves to be repeated, even though this line of reasoning is still present as an almost automatic response to the question, “why them?” (and not us), or “why us” (and not them)?xix As a Christian theologian the emergency pastor operating in disaster contexts must be aware that this line of thought—no matter how widespread it once was—is in conflict with the teachings of Jesus. He asked his contemporaries: Do you really think the galilees whose blood Pilate mixed with the blood of the sacrificial animals were “greater sinners than all other galilees?” Or, what about the eighteen people who were killed by the falling tower in Siloam—“Do you believe they were more guilty than all others in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:1-5). This is a clear no to the idea of God designing evils for those hit by diasters, terror attacks, etc.

The error lies in trying to explain the cause of the disaster from the guilt of others, via a higher-level concept of a God of revenge. Instead, the task is to clarify the situation, as it is, and build bridges towards the future in which the affected will be living after the disaster. A Christian witness must here be concerned with God’s nearness to the victims and the survivors, and with opening doors in the lives of the survivors without neglecting the wounds and memories that are part of the experience of loss and tragedy. In brief, the task of the emergency pastor is to connect past and present and bring the survivors in contact with the creative and sustaining power that God is and remains both to those who survived and to those who did not.

The Gospel and Religious Resilience

Let me now speak almost in the vernacular about how the central Christian message may relate to the problems of tragedy and disaster. A first observation is the simple fact that nowhere does the Christian Gospel promise a life without hardships and hold-ups. Ultimately, the Gospel is about a Kingdom of God, which cannot be fully installed in this world, but which will unfold in a transhistorical life that connects past, present, and future—and therefore already connects the living and the dead. A first theological assumption is here: God is community. More precisely, God is the eternal community of Father, Son and Spirit, that hosts and upholds the transhistorical community of the living and the dead.

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We are here back where we ended in the discussion on tragedy—disaster-related, or not. I here argued that the loss of tragedy is not only about the feelings of those who have to live with tragic memories, nor is tragedy only about the loss of individual lives, whose existence has been wiped away. The most encompassing problem of tragedy is the seemingly irredeemable disruption of community, a disruption of the very communal bonds between the dead and the living, the victims themselves, and the so-called survivors.

Since the problem of tragedy is ultimately about community, and the disruption of community, the only possible redemption is to restore the sense of community. As far as I can see, this be done in one, two or three stages, depending on the world-view options available to the afflicted.

A first stage is to think in purely biological terms. Evolutionary biology thinks in terms of genetic transmission from one generation to another. Hence, from a purely biological perspective, the deceased are still present—not as persons but in the form of genes that are either transmitted to offspring, or are shared in less direct form with the survivors. This biological perspective is not without potential meaning for the survivors, but it is inherently limited, and doesn’t have anything to say to those with surviving kin.

A second stage is to think in terms of cultural memory of the bonds between the living and the dead. Disaster rituals may be seen as a particular way of cultivating an awareness of the deceased that are “keeping them alive”, as it were. However, just like kinship relations thin out over time, so do memories fade away over time, gradually forgetting the lost individuals in the process of collective memorization. The time factor is here much like a factor of despair, since there will be a growing distance between those who were in full existence but who are now only present in cultural memory.

A third stage is the religious view. In the Christian view, faith, hope, and love is what connects past, present and future generations, realizing that the Kingdom of God is here and now (in the present), but also then and there (in the past and in the future). At any moment threads of emotion are spun between the dead and those who are still living the Kingdom of God in horizontal dimension of time.

This sense of the category of a transhistorical community may be said to be the basso continua of the gospel, which can often only be heard in the abyss, de profundis, and can’t be easily turned into a manual for positive psychology. Yet, the point is that once we let go of all the manuals to the easy life with the bright future

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it is possible to rebuild the connections between the past and the present, those tragically lost and those living in the memory of the tragedy.

Here comes other basic ontological commitment to the fore: God is that there is eternity, and God is that there are new possibilities. The Christian faith does not offer guaranties about very particular future, but does insist that there is openness towards new opportunities in life. For that God is the community that hosts and sustains the community of living and dead, means that God is the eternal source of new beginnings that take up, cleanse, and renew the old ties between those living now and the ones whose life was undone. The attitude of faith is here not very doctrinal in its form: It’s all about an attitude of wait and see. Hold on and stay alert. This is the possibility that the Gospel makes the way for in its proclamation that no one dies without hope and that no one dies without love: the love of those left behind and the love of God. God is that there is love.

Conclusion: On Not Wanting to Master I have so far tried to express, in the most simple and minimalistic form, something about Christianity from a theological perspective, i.e. from the innermost resources of the gospel. But also from an external perspective can religion be seen as the place in humanity’s cultural repertoire where the unthinkable is reflected upon.

The Bible, for instance, tells about a broad spectrum of disasters (from the deluge to the apocalypse), about the tragedy of a lonely human being (Job), and about the social failure of not being understood and welcomed (Jesus). Every time the journey leads through death to life. In this sense Christianity too is a religion—a place where the conditions of vulnerability are recognized, while it is added that in the midst of the vulnerability God is present. Life will never be as smooth as expected but the very acknowledgment of this fact uncovers the divine source of a religiously based resilience.

As we have seen, resilience has to do with a number of factors that are not religious per se. Think of the technological resilience in the construction of dikes and houses and bridges. Think also of social resilience so it is ensured that the essential parts of society can function even though other parts of society are struck by disaster. Think also of informational resilience so that all those who are affected by a disaster can receive credible information while preventing false rumors and misinformation. For all of this, we need a social and cultural capital so that the political system neither under- nor overreacts in face of emergencies and disasters.

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Yet we also need a personal resilience that is formed where the bonds of community is norished, even across the divide between the living and the dead.

The religious resilience thus lies in the intersection of the near communities and the person who remains vulnerable. Generally, religion seems have three main capacities.

First, religion generates a sense preparedness for the unthinkable that can be become too real all of a sudden. Faith cultivates an awareness of how the pedestrian commonsense does not contain the full array of what is ultimately real. In situations of tragedy and disaster it would be irrational to believe in common sense only. After all, reality manifests itself as having a much wider compass.

Second, a source for resilience lies in the fact that disasters and tragedies are not purely individual problems. In the language of the ritual a language is used to describe the horrifying experience of how our existence can come apart at the seams. The language of religion moves between the life we share and our own vulnerability. Especially rituals are crucial for the religious resilience in times of disaster. The rituals themselves express how the religious traditions mix sturdiness and flexibility—and this mixture transmits resilience to those who participate in them. Thus, there are strong indications that division between “the secular” and “the religious” is not as clear cut as it is has often been claimed by theorists of secularization. Rather, the two spheres exist simultaneously, and the relationship between the two is not normally experienced as a conflict, but as an interference or an interplay between the controllable reality of the secular sphere and the religious sphere that tries to bring us in touch with what is uncontrollable in our existence. Whatever ambivalence one brings along regarding religious institutions, the ritual is open to everyone who wishes to be a part of it—regardless of one’s previous frame of mind.

Third, the religious language does not only speak about God, but also to God. Prayer and lament are not only ways to address human beings who are worse off than oneself. The prayer addresses God in an appeal for the source of reality to show new ways out of a dark situation. The language of the prayer is full of images of God and humanity language that goes way beyond what we capture with ordinary chit-chat. Religious language—or, more precisely, the cultivating use of religious language—opens the door to deeper realities beyond all insurmountable

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walls, all technological progress, all social reform, and all the too straightforward self-help strategies. The task, after the disaster, is not only a matter of “getting well again”. It is also a matter of articulating the pain is such a way as to connect the individual pain to the pain of the community, and ultimately hand all experiences of loss and pain over to God. Only this makes it possible to move on—without ever becoming what you were before everything fell apart.

Only the one who does not try to master the pain can curb it.

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i US Department of Defense. News Transcript from DoD News Briefing - Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers, February 12, 2002 (http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636, visited August 15, 2015).ii Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).

iii Ted Steinberg, Acts of God. The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America. Updated version (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)

iv Charles E. Fritz, “Diasters”. In Contemporary Social Problems: An Introduction to the Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Social Disorganization, eds. Robert K. Merton and Robert A. Nisbet (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 651-694 (655).

v See Christine Tind Johannessen-Henry, ” Christine Tind Johannesen-Henry, ”Listening for Safe Places: Networks of Playing and Chalcedon in Disaster Pastoral Care” (this issue).

vi Miroslav Volf, Flourishing: Why we need Religion in a Globalized World (Cambridge, Mass.: Yale University Press, 2016), 75.

vii Wilhelm Schmid, Gelassenheit. Was wir gewinnen, wenn wir älter werden (Berlin: Insel Verlag, 2014).viii

I’m here using resources from the program of the so-called ”Scandinavian Creation Theology”, most known from the work of the Danish philosopher of religion K.E. Løgstrup and the Swedish systematic theologian Gustaf Wingren. See Niels Henrik Gregersen, Trygve Wyller, and Bengt Kristensson Uggla (eds.), Reformation Theology for a Post-Secular Age: Løgstrup, Prenter, Wingren, and the Future of Scandinavian Creation Theology (Vandenhoeck & Ruprechts, 2017). See also Mikkel Gabriel Christoffersen, “Trust, Endangerment and Divine Vulnerability: An Interdisciplinary Conversation with Niklas Luhmann and K.E. Løgstrup” (this issue).

ix Rasmus Dahlberg, Christine Tind Johannessen-Henry, Emmanuel Raju & Suhella Tulsiani, “The Resilience Turn: Describing three disaster related versions”. Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems 32:1-2 (2015), 44-54.

x UN-ISDR/United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction, “Terminology on Disaster Risk Reduction” (Geneva: United Nations, 2009), 24. www.unisdr.org/we/inform/terminology (visited September 1, 2015).

xi Jürgen Weichselgartner & Ilan Kelman, “Geographies of resilience: Challenges and opportunities of a descriptive concept”. Progress in Human Geography 2014, 1-19 (11-14).xii

Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Theology and disasters studies: From ‘acts of God’ to divine presence”. In Disaster Research: Multidisciplinary and International Perspectives. Routledge Humanitarian Series, eds. Rasmus Dalberg, Olivier Rubin & Morten T. Vendelø (London-New York: Routledge, 2015), 34-48.

xiii Dara Nix-Stevenson. “Human Response to Natural Disaster”. SAGE Open (July-September 2013), 1-12 (1).xiv

PewResearch Religion & Public Life Project. “The Global Religious Landscape (December 18, 2012)”. www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec (visited September 16, 2014).xv

David Chester & Angus M. Duncan, “Responding to disasters within the Christian tradition, with reference to volcanic eruptions and earthquakes”, Religion 40 (2010), 85-95.

xvi See Arie L. Molendijk, Justin Beaumont and Christof Jedan (eds)., Exploring the Postsecular: The Religious, the Political, and the Urban (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2010). See also the Norwegian case in Lars Johan Danbolt and Hans Stifoss-Hanssen, “Ritual and Recovery: Traditions in Disaster Ritualizing” (this issue).xvii

Harold G. Koenig, In the Wake of Disaster: Religious Responses to Terrorism & Disaster (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006) shows the overrepresentation of religious responses to disaster victims, particularly from churches compared with secular groups. – Such empirical background may of course change over time, not least depending on the amount of aid work supported by federal and state agencies. Increasingly, however, state funded aid initiatives are made in contact with both faith-based and secular NGOs.

xviii John Wesley, “Some Serious Thought Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon” (1755), Works of the Rev. John Wesley (London: Conference Office, 1912), vol. 11, 397-411 (397).xix

As shown by Hanna Sschmuck, this line of thought is still prevalent in Muslim communities in the form of an Act of Allah-theology, see Schmuck, “’An Act of Allah’: Religious Explanations for Floods in Bangladesh as Survival Strategy”. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 2000:1, 85-95.