It is hard to reconcile the concept of a personal, loving God with the tsunami grief, writes Patsy McGarry
So where is God in all of this? Where is the one of whom we were told he so loved the world he gave up his his only begotten son for its salvation?
Where was the God who knows when every sparrow falls, who has a count of every hair on our heads, while the tsunami drowned so many in that unmerciful baptism on December 26th?
Where was He when Aceh was washed away; when Phuket was laid waste, or while the coast of Sri Lanka drowned?
Where has He been to explain why any of this was unleashed in the first place?
Where has He been since, while human bodies stink and swell in the sun like further detritus among the flotsam and jetsam? Where has been the sacredness of human life in all of this?
Where has He been while heartbroken relatives walked through the stench of rotting corpses - their limbs steeled into grotesque shapes - striving desperately against time to find a loved one before burial has to take place? Where has He been when comfort was needed for survivors suffering guilt that they too were not swept away?
Where has He been as anxious relatives thousands of miles away cry their desperation and hope, knowing in their hearts it is all quite useless?
Where is the God of love in all of this? What have those who apologise for Him to say now?
By what logic will they blame humanity for this too, as they do with such ease for so much that is evil? Will they say¨, as the Victorians said of the Irish at the time of the Famine, that it is God's punishment on an indolent, feckless people?
Or will they find God in the outpouring of generosity and concern from people all over the world, trying so hard to alleviate the suffering of the innocents of south-east Asia, now being monsooned-upon too, to add to their misery?
Because with these apologists it is always the case that the good that is in humanity is God's, while the evil is peculiarly our own. Or will they tell us, once more, that it is all a mystery which we must accept - that it is the will of God?
As if we could accept a God who could will such a thing! What sort of God would drown so many thousands of people and condemn so many millions more to such extended misery? What sort of will is there?
Indeed, what sort of God would allow his son be crucified to appease his own anger?
What sort of God would they have us believe in?
Is He the God of the Old Testament, full of wrath and rage, returned more vengeful with His weapons of mass destruction to wreak havoc on a still ungrateful humanity?
And what is there to be grateful for in scraping an existence from the dirt of Sri Lanka? Or is that our fault too?
Is this a born-again old God? Is Aceh the new Sodom, Phukett a latter-day Gomorrah? But then even at the time of the Flood we are told Noah got advance notice of 40 days. They did not get even 40 seconds' warning in south-east Asia.
Will there be a born-again rush to democratise this autocrat and His arbitrary ways; to neutralise His weapons of mass destruction?
History suggests this is doubtful. It is so much easier to find ways of blaming us instead. It always has been.
Or those lofty theologians lost in arid, airless thought, will they tell us once more it all comes down to "the problem of suffering". QED?
That same "problem" which means we have no choice but to accept, as the will of God, the slow decline of a loved one into decrepit, cancerous death, or the disintegration before our very eyes of the soul of a person through Alzheimer's disease, or the unexpected death of a young person.
This is not "a problem" for anyone other than lofty theologians striving for perfect symmetry in the geometry of their doctrines. For most of us it is life, as lived.
And still others will, like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, uphold faith at all costs, believing the people must be protected from the true awfulness of reality.
They are the ones who would bear the burden of truth, while demanding the rest of us occupy a Never-Never Shrekland. They are the ones who, because they assert, feel we must believe.
There is not a God I recognise anywhere in what has happened in south-east Asia. Either He/She/It doesn't exist, has never existed, or we have never understood Him/Her/It properly.
It is very hard to reconcile the concept of a personal, loving God with what we have witnessed and experienced since Christmas.
And as for this creation, well clearly that has been shown to be deeply flawed once again. It is not what one would expect from an omniscient, omnipotent, eternal being, - the Alpha and Omega of existence.
There was a story playwright Samuel Beckett used to tell of a man who went to a tailor to have a suit made. His measurements were taken and the man was told come back in a week.
He did so, to find the tailor had only begun to work on the suit. He was told to come back in another week, and still it wasn't finished. He was told to come back the following week.
"God made the world in six days and in over two weeks you can't make a suit," the man said. "Yes," said the tailor, ". . . and look at the world!" Indeed.
The tsunami of south-east Asia has lent credence to the melancholy view that all there is to this existence is the still, frequently sad music of humanity. Let's look after each other, as no one else will.
Patsy McGarry is Religious Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times