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janeiro 10, 2005
Fé
Onde estava Deus?
Toda sexta-feira, com parcas interrupções, desde 1998, eu me assento na frente da tela do computador e entre uma piscadela e outra do cursor sobre uma página em branco do Word eu respiro fundo e faço uma breve prece. É possivelmente um dos momentos mais solenes da minha semana: a hora de escrever sobre fé. Solenes, porque valorizando, como valorizo, a fé, não posso pisar seu território sem o temor de o fazer levianamente.
Mando esses textos para meus amigos e alguns conhecidos virtuais e às vezes algum deles gera alguma discussão ou troca de idéias edificantes. Nesses textos os acontecimentos cotidianos, as últimas leituras, o curso enviesado de minhas reflexões, tudo se reflete.
Na última sexta-feira escrevi algo chamado "Onde estava Deus?" Percebi que a idéia foi partilhada por trocentas outras pessoas, a começar pelo Inagaki. De fato, a pergunta, ante as cenas horríveis que nos chegaram da Ásia, é quase trivial. Óbvia. Mas nem por isso superficial ou digna de ser ignorada.
Talvez eu divida aqui o que escrevi na sexta, não sei. Não costumo falar de fé aqui, embora não ache que deva fazer uma separação entre fé e outras coisas, sendo que minhas "outras coisas" são todas pintadas sobre o pano de fundo da fé. Ela perpassa tudo. Não sei, mas eu queria agora dividir uma outra coisa. Um outro texto com a mesma temática e título, publicado no New York Times hoje. Quem mo mandou foi o compadre Helio Serafino, sempre alerta.
Vale a pena a leitura, nem que seja necessário usar o bom e velho tradutor automático:
Where Was God?
By William Safire
Published: January 10, 2005
In the aftermath of a cataclysm, with pictures of parents sobbing over dead infants driven into human consciousness around the globe, faith-shaking questions arise: Where was God? Why does a good and all-powerful deity permit such evil and grief to fall on so many thousands of innocents? What did these people do to deserve such suffering?
After a similar natural disaster wiped out tens of thousands of lives in Lisbon in the 18th century, the philosopher Voltaire wrote "Candide," savagely satirizing optimists who still found comfort and hope in God. After last month's Indian Ocean tsunami, the same anguished questioning is in the minds of millions of religious believers.
Turn to the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible. It was written some 2,500 years ago during what must have been a crisis of faith. The covenant with Abraham - worship the one God, and his people would be protected - didn't seem to be working. The good died young, the wicked prospered; where was the promised justice?
The poet-priest who wrote this book began with a dialogue between God and the Satan, then a kind of prosecuting angel. When God pointed to "my servant Job" as most upright and devout, the Satan suggested Job worshipped God only because he had been given power and riches. On a bet that Job would stay faithful, God let the angel take the good man's possessions, kill his children and afflict him with loathsome boils.
The first point the Book of Job made was that suffering is not evidence of sin. When Job's friends said that he must have done something awful to deserve such misery, the reader knows that is false. Job's suffering was a test of his faith: even as he grew angry with God for being unjust - wishing he could sue him in a court of law - he never abandoned his belief.
And did this righteous Gentile get furious: "Damn the day that I was born!" Forget the so-called "patience of Job"; that legend is blown away by the shockingly irreverent biblical narrative. Job's famous expression of meek acceptance in the 1611 King James Version - "though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" - was a blatant misreading by nervous translators. Modern scholarship offers a much different translation: "He may slay me, I'll not quaver."
The point of Job's gutsy defiance of God's injustice - right there in the Bible - is that it is not blasphemous to challenge the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong. (I titled a book on this "The First Dissident.") Indeed, Job's demand that his unseen adversary show up at a trial with a written indictment gets an unexpected reaction: in a thunderous theophany, God appears before the startled man with the longest and most beautifully poetic speech attributed directly to him in Scripture.
Frankly, God's voice "out of the whirlwind" carries a message not all that satisfying to those wondering about moral mismanagement. Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal "I read the Book of Job last night - I don't think God comes well out of it."
The powerful voice demands of puny Man: "Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundations?" Summoning an image of the mythic sea-monster symbolizing Chaos, God asks, "Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?" The poet-priest's point, I think, is that God is occupied bringing light to darkness, imposing physical order on chaos, and leaves his human creations free to work out moral justice on their own.
Job's moral outrage caused God to appear, thereby demonstrating that the sufferer who believes is never alone. Job abruptly stops complaining, and - in a prosaic happy ending that strikes me as tacked on by other sages so as to get the troublesome book accepted in the Hebrew canon - he is rewarded. (Christianity promises to rectify earthly injustice in an afterlife.)
Job's lessons for today:
(1) Victims of this cataclysm in no way "deserved" a fate inflicted by the Leviathanic force of nature.
(2) Questioning God's inscrutable ways has its exemplar in the Bible and need not undermine faith.
(3) Humanity's obligation to ameliorate injustice on earth is being expressed in a surge of generosity that refutes Voltaire's cynicism.
E-mail: safire@nytimes.com
Posted by marcol at janeiro 10, 2005 1:29 PM
Comments
Será que só o Tiagón leu o texto? Eu até comecei, mas desisti. Quero ler o de sua autoria, estamos aguardando.
Posted by: Day at janeiro 11, 2005 10:22 AM
O Cândido de Voltaire é uma obra que satiriza a teoria filosófica de Leibniz, crescente na época, e afirmava que "tout est au mieux" - tudo está em seu melhor, "porque este é um mundo criado por um Deus perfeito." Se criticar um ponto de vista contrário à passividade que Leibniz apregoava é cinismo, então eu (ainda) prefiro ficar do lado de Voltaire. Que disse, quando do terremoto de Lisboa: "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
Posted by: tiagón at janeiro 11, 2005 9:08 AM