Who is your Father?

It could be a reflection of the restlessness and alienation we feel in our hyper-connected but lonely world where we can count ‘friends’ by the hundreds and still contemplate suicide out of sheer loneliness. It could also be a consequence of the casual pattern of mating and procreation that so often substitutes for intimacy and self-giving. If I am an accident or an accessory, to whom do I belong? Whom can I call Father? In this void we in Trinbago insert Papa God - God continues to be a Trini, rushing to our rescue, selectively, in time of natural disaster.

This God is a strange mixture however–he visited a tropical storm on us because “they attack the priest” but he didn’t wreak complete havoc on the land because he is a Trini, and maybe he has real estate interests in some part of the island state? And then there is the assurance that because there are so many “praying people” in the land, God has to spare us. This of course leaves open the uncomfortable question of those parts of the land that experienced flooding and damage, those other countries in the region that suffered more from the storm - is God a local deity who can only attend to one small area at a time? There were also those commentators who angrily challenged our panic praying in the face of impending danger, only to revert to business as usual once the danger was past. Is God to be used for our convenience as we tend to use any agency that can help us? This is perhaps a key to understanding our strange relationship with our local god. God made us in His own image and likeness, but we have returned the compliment, refashioning God in our own image and likeness, cutting Him down to our size.

Anything else would demand profound change on our part and that may be too painful to contemplate.

We would have to factor in free will and the responsibility of choice into the conduct of our daily business so that so-called “acts of God” would have to reference our dealings with the environment and our systems of oppression and economic justice. God would no longer be pressed into service to explain away uncomfortable consequences of our flawed and self-seeking structures.

And most challenging, if we accept God as a Trini, we would have to undertake the transformations necessary to act like our Father, to resemble this God who describes Himself as full of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger and very ready to forgive.

Maybe we prefer to remain “outside children” with a “visiting relationship” with our Father for occasional handouts with no obligations.