Every church in the Episcopal Diocese of Eau Claire will receive a visit from a motorcycle gang with a message: Don’t forget Haiti.

The Rev. George Stamm, a retired minister who led both Christ Episcopal Church and St. Simeon’s Episcopal Church in Chippewa Falls, is one of about 15 bikers who will ride from Superior to La Crosse for four days beginning Thursday ”” stopping at all 22 churches in the diocese to benefit Haiti.

Riders prepare to head out from St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Superior at 8 a.m. Thursday and the public is invited to cheer on the riders and pledge their support for the people of Haiti.

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Raúl Castro, Cuba’s president, has given a nod to the Roman Catholic Church’s desire to play a larger role in solving the communist-run island’s problems, possibly opening the way for the release of political prisoners, leading prelates said, in what experts and diplomats termed his most significant political move since replacing his brother Fidel in early 2008.

Mr Castro met for more than four hours with Cardinal Jaime Ortega and Bishop Dionisio Garcia of Santiago de Cuba, the head of the Conference of Bishops. The last such meeting took place five years ago when Fidel Castro was still in power.

By the weekend the government had informed the church that the prisoners would be moved from far-off locations to jails in their home provinces, and any ill inmates to hospital, according to dissidents and church sources.

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Saturday, we had the presentation by the Theology Committee and their report “Same Sex Relationships in the Life of the Church.” I was a bit disappointed with the report itself, which was really simply two papers, one from the conservative viewpoint, and one from the progressive viewpoint. While they were good papers, the House of Bishops had asked for the committee to prepare “a” paper, not two. I am quite sure this will be published soon, if it is not available already out there somewhere. Still, it did provoke very good discussion, as did the report of the “Around One Table” results. This was a church wide study on the identity of the Episcopal Church. Saturday night were class dinners, and then our Sabbath began….

Sunday night after dinner we had a fireside chat with the Presiding Bishop. Many topics were covered, and much shared but perhaps the most moving was the talk by Bishop of Haiti, Zache’ Duracin….

Bishop Duracin shared with our group the day of the earthquake. It was so moving to hear his story. He had just left his car and was in his front yard, when the earthquake struck. He watched his house crumble before his eyes, with his wife and two girls still inside it. The girls came crawling out of the rubble just minutes after, basically unharmed, but his wife, although alive was trapped. Her leg was, and is, severely damaged. She is now under care in Tampa, Florida. He reported that his car, the one he had just left before the earthquake, was only unearthed this past Friday. He is a very grateful man, to be here, but also for all you have done, and many across this church….

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Did you hear about the Protestant minister who said that Haiti “has been in bondage to the devil for four generations”? No, it wasn’t Pat Robertson but Chavannes Jeune, a popular Evangelical pastor in Haiti who has long crusaded to cleanse his nation of what he believes is an ancestral voodoo curse. It turns out that more than a few Haitians agree with Jeune and Robertson that their nation’s crushing problems are caused by, yes, voodoo.

I know this not because I read it in a newspaper or saw it on TV, but because of a blog. University of Tennessee-Knoxville cultural anthropologist Bertin M. Louis Jr., an expert on Haitian Protestantism, posted an essay exploring this viewpoint on The Immanent Frame, a social scientist group blog devoted to religion, secularism and the public sphere.

Elsewhere on The Immanent Frame, there’s a fascinating piece by Wesleyan University religion professor Elizabeth McAlister touching on how the voodoo worldview affects Haiti’s cultural and political economy. She writes that the widespread belief that events happen because of secret pacts with gods and spirits perpetuates “the idea that real, causal power operates in a hidden realm, and that invisible powers explain material conditions and events.” Though McAlister is largely sympathetic to voodoo practitioners, she acknowledges that any effective attempt to relieve and rebuild Haiti will contend with that social reality.

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Did you hear about the Protestant minister who said that Haiti “has been in bondage to the devil for four generations”? No, it wasn’t Pat Robertson but Chavannes Jeune, a popular Evangelical pastor in Haiti who has long crusaded to cleanse his nation of what he believes is an ancestral voodoo curse. It turns out that more than a few Haitians agree with Jeune and Robertson that their nation’s crushing problems are caused by, yes, voodoo.

I know this not because I read it in a newspaper or saw it on TV, but because of a blog. University of Tennessee-Knoxville cultural anthropologist Bertin M. Louis Jr., an expert on Haitian Protestantism, posted an essay exploring this viewpoint on The Immanent Frame, a social scientist group blog devoted to religion, secularism and the public sphere.

Elsewhere on The Immanent Frame, there’s a fascinating piece by Wesleyan University religion professor Elizabeth McAlister touching on how the voodoo worldview affects Haiti’s cultural and political economy. She writes that the widespread belief that events happen because of secret pacts with gods and spirits perpetuates “the idea that real, causal power operates in a hidden realm, and that invisible powers explain material conditions and events.” Though McAlister is largely sympathetic to voodoo practitioners, she acknowledges that any effective attempt to relieve and rebuild Haiti will contend with that social reality.

Read it all.

Each Sunday morning, members of White Stone Church spread photos of the girls’ grinning, impish faces across a folding table in the lobby, then prayed for the day they might join them.

When the churchgoers closed their eyes and bowed their heads, it no longer mattered that 1,400 miles separated them from the girls or that they lived in a Haitian village whose dirt floors and lack of running water were unthinkable in north Knoxville’s quilt of neatly tended subdivisions and fast-food drive-thrus.

They are “Our Girls,” the worshippers told one another.

Over six years, the girls of Coq Chante had come to feel like family. Now, after trips by dozens to Haiti, thousands of dollars raised and spent, and countless hours poring over adoption paperwork, the bond with 19 children from another world felt unbreakable.

Until a Tuesday night in January.

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Each Sunday morning, members of White Stone Church spread photos of the girls’ grinning, impish faces across a folding table in the lobby, then prayed for the day they might join them.

When the churchgoers closed their eyes and bowed their heads, it no longer mattered that 1,400 miles separated them from the girls or that they lived in a Haitian village whose dirt floors and lack of running water were unthinkable in north Knoxville’s quilt of neatly tended subdivisions and fast-food drive-thrus.

They are “Our Girls,” the worshippers told one another.

Over six years, the girls of Coq Chante had come to feel like family. Now, after trips by dozens to Haiti, thousands of dollars raised and spent, and countless hours poring over adoption paperwork, the bond with 19 children from another world felt unbreakable.

Until a Tuesday night in January.

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When they heard I was going to report in Haiti after the massive earthquake, fifth-graders from Amylynn Robinson’s class asked if I could deliver some messages to any children I’d meet. Their letters included drawings of flowers, hearts and rainbows. And they began simply:

“Hello Haiti, nice to meet you.”

“Dear Buddy … ”

“Hi there, I’m a child as well.”

“Dear friend, I am your friend. I wrote this letter to tell you I care about you.”

The children wrote about their school, Balboa Magnet Elementary, a public school in Northridge, Calif., in Northern Los Angeles County, which was the epicenter of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994. Although these 10-year-olds were not alive then, many say they’ve heard stories about the damage in California. So they were sympathetic to kids coping with the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti…..

This is just a fantastic piece that I caught on the morning run. You really need to do the audio as it is far superior when you hear the children’s voices (about 7 1/3 minutes). And check out which song one of the Haitian children chose to send back to the children in California! Listen to it all–KSH.

When they heard I was going to report in Haiti after the massive earthquake, fifth-graders from Amylynn Robinson’s class asked if I could deliver some messages to any children I’d meet. Their letters included drawings of flowers, hearts and rainbows. And they began simply:

“Hello Haiti, nice to meet you.”

“Dear Buddy … ”

“Hi there, I’m a child as well.”

“Dear friend, I am your friend. I wrote this letter to tell you I care about you.”

The children wrote about their school, Balboa Magnet Elementary, a public school in Northridge, Calif., in Northern Los Angeles County, which was the epicenter of a magnitude 6.7 earthquake in 1994. Although these 10-year-olds were not alive then, many say they’ve heard stories about the damage in California. So they were sympathetic to kids coping with the magnitude 7.0 earthquake in Haiti…..

This is just a fantastic piece that I caught on the morning run. You really need to do the audio as it is far superior when you hear the children’s voices (about 7 1/3 minutes). And check out which song one of the Haitian children chose to send back to the children in California! Listen to it all–KSH.

Read it carefully and read it all.

People of faith have responded to such disasters in two ways. First they, like Darwin, have attempted to try and understand how such a world can be created by a loving God. While some at the fringes of the church have proclaimed the horror caused by earthquakes and hurricanes as the judgement of God, most Christians see something in the view that the creativity inherent in the world also brings with it risk. So the fault lines which cause devastating earthquakes have also been of immense benefit by providing minerals, oil, and good soil for agriculture. In fact, the 19th century evangelical and friend of Darwin, Asa Gray, argued that evolution’s waste and suffering were necessary for more complex forms of life to emerge in creation.

However, such insights can sound very trite to the person who has lost a loved one or been made homeless. In addition, they don’t provide a full explanation to the extent of suffering, a point which struck Darwin strongly.

It’s here that there has been a second response. Seeing in Jesus, both a God who gives genuine freedom to the Universe and a God of compassion in the face of need, churches have been motivated to be at the forefront of help to those affected by earthquakes despite the unanswered questions of suffering.

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Chile is on a hotspot of sorts for earthquake activity. And so the 8.8-magnitude temblor that shook the region overnight was not a surprise, historically speaking. Nor was it outside the realm of normal, scientists say, even though it comes on the heels of other major earthquakes.

One scientist, however, says that relative to the time period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, Earth has been more active over the past 15 years or so.

The Chilean earthquake, and the tsunami it spawned, originated on a hot spot known as a subduction zone, where one plate of Earth’s crust dives under another. It’s part of the active “Ring of Fire,” a zone of major crustal plate clashes that surround the Pacific Ocean.

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Check it out–very worthwhile.

Consider a few facts. Voodoo is one of the official religions of Haiti, and its designation in 2003 merely granted official acknowledgment to a longstanding reality. The slave revolt that brought Haiti independence indeed relied on voodoo, the New World version of ancestral African faiths. To this day, by various scholarly estimates, 50 percent to 95 percent of Haitians practice at least elements of voodoo, often in conjunction with Catholicism.

Yet in searching the LexisNexis database of news coverage and doing a Google search this week, I found that Catholicism figured into three times as many accounts of the quake as did voodoo. A substantial share of the reports that did mention voodoo were recounting Mr. Robertson’s canard or adopting it in articles asking Haitian survivors if they felt their country was cursed.

At a putatively more informed level, articles, broadcasts and blogs depicted voodoo as the source of Haiti’s poverty and political instability ”” not because of divine punishment, mind you, but because voodoo supposedly is fatalistic and primitive by nature.

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The Jan. 12 earthquake was an equal opportunity leveler with such mass deadliness that it erased the individuality of its victims. According to the Haitian government, more than 230,000 people died in the disaster, but initially few had ceremonies to mark their deaths. Even the collective loss of life was not memorialized until this past weekend, when the government imposed a national period of mourning.

Bit by bit, though, the individual losses are coming into focus for Haitians finally ready to grieve. Many victims were not accepted as dead until the search missions were over, and many bodies were never recovered or were dumped in mass graves. But belatedly, funerals and memorial services are taking place daily, and the traditional word-of-mouth network known as telediol has reawakened, delivering death notices.

If Haiti, always stoic, first seemed too stunned to cry, the tears are rolling now for those who seem irreplaceable: the tax man who wrote software to detect fraud in a corrupt society; the gallery owner whose eminent Haitian art collection perished with her; the writer who translated the culture’s oral storytelling into prose; the feminist leaders; the nursing students; the factory workers; the teachers; and the children, especially the children.

“My little girls died at the very moment I was making plans for their future,” said Frantz Thermilus, the chief of Haiti’s National Judicial Police, caressing their pictures on his cellphone. “And the future of the children is the future of Haiti.”

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The number of dead from Haiti’s earthquake has been estimated as high as 200,000. That’s nearly 7 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince. Imagine the entire population of Des Moines, Iowa, vaporized.

This is a country that observes death with elaborate ceremony. But with most of the bodies hauled to mass graves or still entombed in fallen buildings, normal funeral rituals are impossible.

All over Port-au-Prince, the places that usually play an integral role in burial customs are eerily empty.

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For Haitians in particular, the mass graves are wrenching. [Karen] Richman says Haitians place significant emphasis on dying with dignity and holding a funeral, a process that can take nine days. Relationships with the dead last forever; survivors believe their ancestors visit them in their dreams and give them guidance.

“Every culture has its way of making sense of the beginning and end of life. Our rituals are the way we control what these events mean to us: Irish wakes, Jews saying the Kaddish prayer, Hindu processions,” she says.

Although the Catholic Church frowns on voodoo culture, it is pervasive in Haiti, where many are buried with both Catholic and voodoo rites. “Every family inherits the spirits their ancestors worshiped,” Richman says. “You need to communicate with the ancestors to reach these spirits or souls. You need to know they have been respected.”

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John Pipkin is a retired pilot. He’s held many jobs, most recently working for Netjets International, flying celebrities around.

These days, he flies relief workers, medical teams and humanitarian aid from airstrip to airstrip in Haiti.

His wife, Joyce, is the volunteer coordinator of the Haitian ministry at their church, St. Mary’s Episcopal in Columbia, which sponsors a parish and its school in Les Cayes, a town in the southwest section of the country.

The Pipkins travel together at least three times a year helping the needy, coordinating mission work, assisting the international community of aid workers and supporting local clergy. They visited Charleston Southern University on Wednesday to share their story.

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It is important to maintain two contradictory attitudes at once in many areas of Christian theology, and this is one of those areas. These are the two clashing points of view in this case:

Point of view #1: The creation does declare the glory of God, and the “Thunderstorm Psalm” (#29: “The Lord breaks the cedars of Lebanon”) proclaims that message magnificently. God is not only the Creator but also the One who rules over the cosmos. The theophany in the book of Job (chs. 38-41) is the preeminent biblical passage treating of this subject, and the phrase “the doors of the sea” is derived from 38:8. Many people have experienced a sort of theophany–a manifestation of the power of God–even in the midst of destruction; people have testified to this even when they have had to face the dire consequences of a natural catastrophe (there are examples of this in Isaac’s Storm, the book about the hurricane that destroyed Galveston, and in David McCullough’s account of the Johnstown Flood). So the wild, untamed aspect of nature can be either comforting or exhilarating or both, depending on one’s point of view.

Point of view #2: At the same time, nature is not benign. Nature is “red in tooth and claw.” Nature, like the human race, is fallen and is subject to the powers of the evil one who continues to occupy this sphere. Flannery O’Connor wrote that her work was about the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil; we should not fail to realize that “nature” is part of that occupied territory. Nature is often hostile, as Annie Dillard has so powerfully shown us, and the nature-worshippers among us fail to acknowledge this hostility in their pantheistic enthusiasm. Only by action of the Creator will the peaceable kingdom arrive, where the lion lies down with the lamb (isn’t it suggestive that “Lion of Judah” and “Lamb of God” are both titles of our Lord?)

The conflict between these two realities cannot be resolved in this life. Does the Creator of all that is have the power to say to those tectonic plates, “Be still!” Of course. Then why doesn’t he? Why does he permit earthquakes in the poorest country in the hemisphere?

We do not know.

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[BOB] ABERNETHY: When people come to you and say where was God in what happened in Haiti, what do you tell them?

[RABBI JACK] MOLINE: The glib answer is to just say God was there. But I was walking through the synagogue the other day and a couple of kids were horsing around. One of them bumped her head and started to cry. Her friend immediately apologized, and I walked over and gave her a hug. I wasn’t able to stop the pain, but I was able to share it with her a little bit, as was her friend. I think that’s where God is””sharing that pain.

ABERNETHY: With the people who are suffering, suffering with them?

MOLINE: With the people who are suffering. Absolutely.

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Watch it all–wonderful stuff.

[Interviewer]This is an appalling tragedy, the UN are saying that it may well be the biggest natural disaster in history. How do we reconcile our faith with this terrible tragedy on this scale?

ABY: I think it is not an easy thing to reconcile, the heart of it because it is just so so awful and the people suffering terribly. We tend to look for answers actually where there are sometimes no answers.

I think the reconciliation for me comes in my understanding of God as I see him in Jesus Christ. A God who is almighty and powerful is born like a little baby, grows up and is crucified, doing for us that which we can not do for ourselves. On the cross you hear him say “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” But that’s not the end. He rises from death, conquering evil and death and pointing out to us that actually in the end it is life in God which matters. So a God who has becomes like one of us, dies, rises, sends his Spirit, that we may be forgiven for the wrongs we have done in the past, and given new life in the present and hope for the future.

That kind of a God is neither to be seen as the sort of grand puppet master who just pulls pulleys nor is he a Dr Who, or a Wonderwoman or Superman but actually a God who is there with us. Rabbi Hugo Gryn was a survivor of the Holocaust and was asked the same question “Where was God when the Jews were being gassed? Why did he allow it to happen?” and Rabbi Hugo Gryn said “God in those gas chambers was being violated and blasphemed”. That God is always around us, with us, suffering with us and giving us the hope that in tragedy and death and things we can’t explain – in the end these things are not the end.

Read the whole thing (or use the audio link at the bottom).

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It was a blessing for me to encounter the theologian Austin Farrer a year before his sudden death. With him, I was one handshake away from his friends Tolkien, Lewis, and Sayers. In reflecting on natural disasters and God’s action in the world, he said with stark realism that in an earthquake, God’s will is that the elements of the Earth’s crust should behave in accordance with their nature. He was speaking of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, which killed about the same number of people counted so far in devastated Haiti. Most were killed in churches on All Saints Day, which gave license to rationalists of the “Enlightenment” to mock the doctrine of a good God. Atheists can suddenly pretend to be theologians puzzled by the contradictory behavior of a benevolent God. On the other extreme, doltish TV evangelists summon a half-baked Calvinism to say that people who get hit hard deserve it.

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The only people who would seem to have the right to invoke God at the moment are the Haitians themselves, who beseech his help amidst dreadful pain. They, too, alas, appear to wander the wasteland of theodicy. News reports have described some Haitians giving voice to a worldview uncomfortably close to Pat Robertson’s, in which a vengeful God has been meting out justified retribution: “I blame man. God gave us nature, and we Haitians, and our governments, abused the land. You cannot get away without consequences,” one man told The Times last week.

Others sound like a more frankly theological President Obama: a 27-year-old survivor, Mondésir Raymone, was quoted thus: “We have survived by the grace of God.” Bishop Éric Toussaint, standing near his damaged cathedral, said something similar: “Why give thanks to God? Because we are here. What happened is the will of God. We are in the hands of God now.” A survivor’s gratitude is combined with theological fatalism. This response is entirely understandable, uttered in a ruined landscape beyond the experience of most of us, and a likely source of pastoral comfort to the bishop’s desperate flock. But that should not obscure the fact that it is little more than a piece of helpless mystification, a contradictory cry of optimistic despair.

Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to God. We who are, at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not, might reflect on the almost invariably uncharitable history of theodicy, and on the reality that in this context no invocation of God beyond a desperate appeal for help makes much theological sense. For either God is punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or as capricious as nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent (the Obama view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses God’s power over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and intervening power, supports the first view; and the history of humanity’s lonely suffering decisively suggests the second.

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The Episcopal Diocese of Haiti is caring for close to 23,000 Haitians in at least 21 encampments around the earthquake-devastated country.

The information came Jan. 23 in a letter from Bishop Jean Zaché Duracin to Episcopal Relief & Development President Robert Radtke and posted here. In the letter, Duracin said that the diocese and the organization are working “hand-in-hand,” telling Radtke he has “complete confidence in you and your agency.”

“Please tell our partners, the people of the Episcopal Church, the people of the United States and indeed the people of the world that we in Haiti are immensely grateful for their prayers, their support and their generosity,” Duracin wrote. “This is a desperate time in Haiti; we have lost so much. But we still have the most important asset, the people of God, and we are working continuously to take care of them.”

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Though some 80 percent of Haiti’s 9 million people are professed Catholics and 16 percent are Protestants, roughly half of the total population practices Vodou, according to the CIA’s World Factbook.

Like many other indigenous religions, it has its high form and folk form, priests and rituals, according to June McDaniel, religion professor at the College of Charleston. It derives from several African cultures, including the Yoruba, and equates its gods and goddesses with Catholic saints.

For example, Legba, the messenger of the gods and a force of destiny, is thought to live at the crossroads of the spirit and material worlds. He is a doorkeeper and, thus, associated with St. Peter.

According to the beliefs, Vodou gods, or loas, live on an underwater island with the souls of the dead, McDaniel said. They are able to communicate with the living who are eager to make contact. To do so, people pray and perform various rituals.

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How did you get involved with Haiti?

I first went to Haiti 12 years ago with my friend, Anne Fairbanks, a Skidmore professor who founded the Haiti mission at our church in Troy 25 years ago. I took over the job from Anne in 2005 after I retired. Anne died last year at 85, but I’m so grateful she introduced me to Haiti. I’d never been to a Third World country when Anne dragged me along to Haiti in 1998 and it was an eye-opener for me. I fell in love with the people in Haiti at the church we sponsored, particularly the teachers, who worked so hard for so little money. Since then, I’ve made seven trips to Haiti.”

How does your church support your partner parish in Haiti?

Our members have been very generous to Haiti over the years and we send about $5,000 a year in donations. We’ve purchased school supplies, musical instruments and raised salaries for the teachers. We’ve helped improve the quality of the school in many ways, including expanding it to K-12 and a student body of 350 boys and girls. When I first visited, the fourth- and fifth-graders were barely reading. This year, every single one of the students in 12th grade passed the national exam. Every day at noon, volunteer ladies from the church make beans and rice for lunch. For many of the kids, it’s the only food they’ll get all day. They love sardines on it, which didn’t really appeal to me, but I started bringing cans of sardines on every visit. Every student gets a sardine on the top of their beans and rice and it’s a huge treat for them.

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