Where Are God's Eyes?

Having lived and worked in Honduras with fellow Passionists for many years, it was with great joy that I made my annual trip there last October to spend a week with the friends who continue our mission. On the same plane was the mayor of Tegucigalpa, with whom I engaged in friendly discussion. Little did I know that three weeks later I would return to Honduras to participate in disaster relief, following the hurricane that destroyed much of the country, and claimed the life of the mayor.

I am haunted by my first image of the broken city. My heart was like lead as I surveyed the awesome destruction from the banks of the Coluteca River, which runs right through the city. I recalled how Christ had gazed across the Kidron Valley with deep sorrow, envisioning a future Jerusalem so destroyed that not one stone would be left upon another. Here, I was gazing with a similar deep sorrow, as I saw what used to be, and as I reflected on the terrible suffering exacted by the leveling of these stones.

On the first night of that ferocious storm, a native priest, Father Reyes, rushed out of his house into the torrential darkness, responding to the anguished screams of children. They were on the roof of their pathetic shack, surrounded by raging waters which tore at its foundation and raced up its walls to destroy them. The priest was stunned, and his heart was forever branded by the depth of the suffering he witnessed, and by the suffocating knowledge of his own inability to save those little children.

In ancient Jewish thought, it was inconceivable that God could look upon evil or suffering and not intervene with help and blessing. This begets a question: What catches God's eye when tragedy does not? As Fr. Reyes watched in soul-anguish the death of the small children engulfed by the furious waters, where were God's eyes? What was God looking at?

The ornate crucifixes that adorn our churches often blunt the sense that we worship a God who was brutalized and butchered. Good Friday brings us back to that truth. And Easter Sunday always reminds us that triumph over death and full life with God does not bring perfect healing. The Risen Christ bears his wounds still. The wounds are precious to God, preserved forever, the place of intimate union. The wounds become the way that Thomas and all future doubters could come to believe.

And so, somehow, it seems that God, far from willing our sufferings or crucifixions, cannot be more united with us than during those times and through those wounds. God is there with help and blessing. And God's eyes? They were gazing back at the world from the broken city, gazing back at Fr. Reyes through the eyes of the dying children--with a depth of love and compassion we will never understand until all our wounds, too, are glorified.