Tsunami. Some ask - why did God not intervene to prevent such appalling human misery? Because there is no such God. Some say - it is God's Will. With every respect to the many millions of religious people around the world who believe this I have to say, rubbish, there is no such God. People who profess any belief in 'God' or a Divine Principle at the heart of all things have to face up to these brute facts, sooner or later.

I heard a Christian pastor say on T.V. that the disaster had strengthened his faith because he had witnessed a 'miracle'. A German whose wife and child had perished, who had both legs amputated, had been encouraged by him to turn away from thoughts of suicide. If he sees this as a miracle in the midst of this vast destruction so be it, I am not there. Not at all (and I am relieved that there are those in the Catholic Church who are beginning to say that the validity of miracles as a proof of sainthood is an anachronism).

Listen to the language we still use in worship - "Hear us merciful Father, we humbly pray....". "Look with favour on your people", "Remember Lord your Church in every land.. " This absentminded God who has to be pleaded with, implored, constantly tapped on the divine shoulder to remind 'him' about us all, does not exist. We persist in making 'God' in human image only, a dressed-up superhuman, an occasionally benevolent eye in the sky, and this is woefully inadequate. Our God is pathetically small. We have to take the words of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and breathe them into our souls -"God is different from any kind of difference we can think of or imagine as different". People of faith have to learn to survive in the pounding, chaotic seas of doubt and contradiction. We have to leave behind such images of God. We have to wake up and grow up. Tsunami, amongst all the other things it is and is not, is a wake-up call to 'believers'. We have to live at a much deeper level in the black-dark mystery of faith. Nature is beautiful, it is paradise islands, it is fertile, abundant, bursting with life and colour. It is also red in tooth and claw.

The astro-physics of the universe now tell us that we are living on a knife-edge all the time, that the chance of life at all on planet earth is so finely calibrated that it is like passing through the eye of a needle in all the permutations that could have happened in the evolution of our world. That is the miracle if you want it, that there is life at all. If you want to talk about 'God', physicists say that 'the divine principle' is evolving in us, in human beings, all the time: it is 'love' that makes the world go round, love in us and through us. I believe that sheer goodness is at the heart of all things and has to be uncovered, that this is the human quest, the ultimate purpose in life. And as many have said in these last days, if you want to discover ' the divine principle', 'God', in what is happening, look at the response of the peoples of the world. Unprecedented. Amazing. Almost beyond belief that we should care so much, reach out so far.

Be certain therefore amongst all the dark mysteries of the universe which we have not yet comprehended and seem to defeat us, that the volume of goodness, of sheer unconditional, unrelenting love is expanding all the time; the divine principle is emerging gradually in hearts and minds. There will always be large corruptions, exploitations, perversions, evils to spiral us downwards towards despair, but look at the proliferation of people caring for people in recent generations —not only globally, Oxfam, War on Want, Christian Aid, Cafod, Water Aid, Unicef, Amnesty International but in our own backyard - Mind, Shelter, Help the Aged, Alzheimers Society, Alcoholics Anonymous, Samaritans, Stroke, Scope, RNLI, Hospice at Home. And then there is Rape Counselling, Debt Counselling, Bereavement, HIV/Aids Counselling, Drug Rehab, on and on the brilliant list goes. At heart, people are magnificent. We are magnificent. All the time we are coming further out of our shells; climbing out of survival ourselves, we look to help others survive.

This is where we have to put our faith in these desperate times when faith is sorely tested. In the great religions of the world, unperverted and undogmatic, there are central teachers, who, in the way they have been amongst us, show us the way to balance the human and the divine in our living. Suffering is part of our quality of life, it happens. If we run away from it when it hits, we destroy ourselves and others. Through the suffering which comes to us we can be moved into a larger and larger space which embraces more and more people. It is very hard. It is also the truth. Pray? Why of course because prayer is an intensifying of light into dark places, a focusing of our collected goodnesses which nothing can blot out except our own blindness: let us not be afraid of the power of our compassion.

Tsunami is a large moment in human history, we have in a few days enlarged our human horizon. We stop eating, we look, we stare, we weep, our hearts break, we reach out Human barriers dissolve. It is a new world alright if we want to make it so, a more divine place. Hold onto this large moment, lest we forget, in the months ahead when the horrors recede and we are sucked back into some of the greeds and meannesses of daily life, and when we go into the snarling infighting (we need to grow up here too) of the next election which will sicken us. Lest we forget. We are in our heart of hearts, magnificent, so much larger man we dare believe, and this in the end is the only thing that matters.