Kimberly Emerson

Hello, dear readers.  It is a new year, and after a long absence, I am back to writing.

I realized last week that it had been over two months – okay, three – since my last post.  The holidays crept up, taking my money and time, but now that January is here, I have this wild desire to get back on track.  Goodness, I thought, what will I write about?  Where do we begin 2010?  Then I heard about Haiti.

I could spend a very long, detailed column about the horrors that were part of the earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince, but others can do it better, and have.  I probably wouldn’t have felt the need to write about it, other than possibly to solicit your prayers, had Pat Robertson not gone on record to say that the disaster was Haiti’s own fault.

Truthfully, I can’t say I was horrified.  I was horrified the first time, back in the 1980s, when Pat’s buddy Jerry Falwell said that God created AIDS as a way to kill off gay people.   I was appalled in 2001 when the two of them agreed that God allowed the 9/11/01 terrorist bombings as a way to punish America for listening to the gays and the liberals.  I was angry when he and John Hagee said that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for New Orleans having a gay pride parade and, I think I understood correctly, America’s tolerance for abortion.  By the time I heard that Pat was blaming Haiti’s earthquake on a pact with the devil allegedly made by some of its slaves 200 years ago, I couldn’t work up any true horror.  Bemusement was the best I could offer.

Something this predictable never stops hurting, but it does stop surprising after a while.  My first thought upon hearing the latest pronouncement was that one of our less-reputable news organizations actually pays Pat to keep spouting things like this, to create controversy.  Many of my friends think it’s just his way of getting attention, because attention equals money.  Upon reflection, however, I suspect the truth is a lot more pedestrian.   As much as I dislike the man – and there is not room on one webpage to explain how much that is – I think I get what he’s trying to do.  Contrary to what he claims, I don’t think he or any of his friends are trying to reform the rest of us.

They’re trying to protect themselves.

It’s a very human impulse.  A big disaster happens.  People die.  The survivors get hurt and have to live with loss of family and friends, as well as all the materials things they’ve spent a lifetime accumulating.  The agony of the event is overwhelming.  I don’t want to feel that.  So, I look for a reason.  If there was a cause for this, then I can protect myself.  If they did something to bring this on themselves, then I can act differently, and thus stop it from ever happening to me or the people that I love.

Reminding myself of this helps me get perspective.  I can pity Pat Robertson and all who think like him.  It’s got to be a very scary way to live, thinking that God is going to punish you if your ancestors got out of line.  I can pray for him and for all the Haitians who are hurting a little more through this disaster because of his statement.  (For the record, many of them deny that the pact ever took place.)  And then I can pray for myself, because this man made my life as a Christian a little harder today.

I don’t believe that I must pay for every mistake my family has made over the past two hundred years, even though we have made plenty.  (Three words, Peter and Geoff: Trashing the Koala.  I will say no more.)   However, like it or not, I must deal with the impact of Pat Robertson’s words.

Upon hearing that I am a Christian, people who are not of the same faith search their mental rolodex for what they know about the religion.  Now, thanks to this man, they will remember (because things like this are difficult to forget, even with years of therapy and/or shock treatment) that a Christian said Haitians deserved to suffer.  Before they can stop themselves, they will wonder if I have the same view.  Some will assume that I do.  I can only hope to live my life in such a way that they see that I don’t.  Myself, I don’t think God doles out insta-punishment.  The Bible is pretty clear about the rain falling on the just and the unjust.  (See Matthew 5:45.)  When people brought a blind man to Jesus and asked whose fault it was that he was blind, his or his parents, Jesus said it was neither, but that it happened “so that the work of God might be displayed in his life” (John 9:3b).  God allows things that we don’t always understand for reasons that we don’t always understand.  The only thing I know for sure is that God also promised to be with us through all those things.  Which, at least to me, is a lot better than a god who gives love only if he’s sure you and all your ancestors have never screwed up.

I once told my friend Ann that there have been a lot of people claiming to be Christians who make me embarrassed to admit that I am one.  She told me that since there was no way of making them quieter, the rest of us needed to be louder.  So today, to those of you reading who happen to be Christians, I say: be a little louder.  My prayer is that one day, when someone with an audience blames the victim in the name of Christianity, people of all faiths will think, “Well, the Christians I know don’t believe that.”

Oh, and one last observation: I think that if God was going to smite someone for stuff done 200 years ago,  it would be the slave owners, not the slaves, no matter what they may have said in a weak moment.  But that’s just me.

Kimberly Emerson had to do a lot of yucky research for this column and is now going to attempt to wash her mind.