The day after the Estonia shipwreck, 800 dead...

We offer this text written by Florin in 1994, the day after the Estonia ferry-boat shipwreck in the Baltic sea which led to the death of 800 passengers...

“Let us leave the surface! And without leaving the world…” The storm, the shipwreck, the earthquake, “let’s go deeper into God.”  (P. Teilhard de Chardin)

How! Is God within the earthquake? Hold on a minute! Have you ever heard anyone say that God’s within the earthquake? Have you ever heard anyone say that God is within a shipwreck? No! So? As long as you do not go to the theological consequences of the act of creation that assimilates in advance earthquakes and shipwrecks; As long as you do not enter into the mystery of the depths of Christ Resurrected who now, with the glory of Easter has entered into the raging waters of the Baltic sea, into 150 mph winds, into the ferryboat which lost its keel; as long as you do not enter with Christ Resurrected and with Mary assumed in the depths of the angry volcanoes, into the lava which shakes the volcanoes near Manilla; as long as you do not enter into the drama of the cosmos; as long as you do not leave the surface to enter into the depths and discover God the Creator and God the Saviour there; what would the Church have to say to the world? If we say nothing, it’s terrifying! What can we actually say on the subject of Rwanda? Have we opened up to the mystery of the depths of God? Let us pass!

We must say that that night, when the boat was shipwrecked and eight hundred people drowned in the Baltic, all of them were welcomed by the glory of God. There was one big blood transfusion. There was one big communication of a new kind of energy! One of the things that most scandalises me is that when such things happen, we don’t dare talk about the universality and responsibility of God the Creator, of the responsibility of Christ Resurrected, of the universal presence of Mary taken up in assumption, and their action within all those who now fall into the depth of God. No, things don’t continue as they did before, it’s the second creation that seized them, the Divine Emergency Service works. And that’s the Gospel of salvation, the Gospel of the resurrection from now on. You would have to be able to reach all those people who stayed in Stockholm or Estonia at their doors, those who were waiting for relatives who will never come back, who they’ll never see again...to tell them that, from now on, in the secret of the heart, there is correspondence and communion and that there is a convergence between Heaven and earth.

They have made the journey, and what we call “a catastrophe” (because we remain on the surface), is in reality for them “anastrophe”, meaning it’s a journey from the condition of first existence, prisoner to all the physio-chemical, spatial-temporal laws which necessarily lead to the extinction of energies in the nullity of the entropy, in one way or another. This journey into divine energy which is called the immensity, the eternity, where time no longer passes by. These beings have “passed” promoted to their condition of children of God, participating in the way which God himself leads his eternal life.

We cannot use this way of talking with the general population, nor give a homily on a television screen, but Christians should be filled with it. Which is why, when faced with all the disasters in their lives, they should have something which Paul, in chapter 4 of the book of Phillippians calls “serenity”. It’s not that they do not cry with those who are crying, it’s not that they don’t share their sorrow, but they have the serene assurance that life continues more beautifully in a hidden transfiguration.

Evidently, from this side of the curtain, if we don’t have the origins of the Holy Spirit in our depths, we are totally “helpless”. But if we habitually live with the Holy Spirit, we are no longer afraid for those who have departed and we call upon these origins in the heart of those who have stayed. There’s no other solution than to experience the Holy Spirit.

Outside of this perspective, we stumble on the problem of evil, and we cannot get out.

Florin Callerand,
“Le Drame du Monde” (The world’s drama)
© 2001, p.82 à 88

French to English translation by Debbie Garrick and Cécile Simon