Where is God?

On a blazing hot day last August my friend Nick and I left the beautiful city of Split and wandered along the shore of the Adriatic, occasionally snorkelling in its crystal waters — necessary to cool off in such heat, and my last chance to gaze at the magical submarine world before I left Croatia. Along the way, he explained to me ‘the trouble’ with Kosovo — of the Battle of Kosovo Field in 1389, which had come to symbolise the origins of Serb nationalism and nationhood through their ‘glorious defeat’ at the hands of the Ottoman Turks; of the rise of Milosevic which began with his decision to support the cause of the Serb nationalists in Kosovo; of the steady disempowerment and de-skilling of the Albanian majority there by Milosevic over the past decade, to the extent that a system of apartheid every bit as sinister and violent as that in South Africa had developed; of the exclusion of Kosovo from the arrangements made in the Dayton peace agreement because it was a powder keg the peacemakers dare not touch as they strove to make peace for Bosnia — leaving Kosovo for later; and of the increasing disillusion of the Kosovo Albanians (Kosovars) with the attempts of Rugova and their elected parliament who could do little against Milosevic's repression, and the consequent increasing support for the Kosovo Liberation Army. Little did I guess in the August sunshine how that small province of two million inhabitants would soon be the focus of so much horror.

But I was beginning to get used to painful paradox, for Croatia is such a beautiful land … and so scarred. With Nick's girlfriend, Anna, and my boyfriend, Mark, we had sat on the beach at Dubrovnik one evening and watched forest fires blazing out of control along the coast. They could not be fought like normal fires, because no-one dared enter the mined forests. As the smell of smoke grew, we began to fear for the city itself — quite the most exquisite city I've ever seen — and two of us began to pray that the wind would drop. From which a debate ensued — what does prayer do? If God can intervene, why doesn't he anyway, regardless of prayer? Surely all prayer can do is strengthen our own relationship with God? No, our prayers are part of the pattern through which God works — does that mean God cannot work without our will to pray? Sometimes, maybe yes. I've done a lot of praying about that land since that night — and a lot of wondering what it was.

The following day, in one of Dubrovnik's churches, we saw an art exhibition — the picture which captivated us all was Christ as Croatia crucified. For Anna that was a disturbing symbol of Croatian nationalism — Anna and Nick spent much of their time helping Serbs ‘ ethnically cleansed’ from Croatia or denied their jobs because of their race, and while we were in Split one of Anna's workmates reported on an Orthodox monastery he'd found, desecrated by the ‘ Catholic’ Croatians. God's church had become an excuse and a tool in this nationalism, on both sides — it is unsurprising that many non- Christian aid workers in the Balkans perceive Christianity/the Church as an institution of oppression, ‘the bad guys’. As a political historian, the picture seemed to me little more than the kind of propaganda I was used to studying in the Middle Ages. But since then, as I wonder what God is doing as his creatures tear each other apart, that picture has returned as something else — less a ‘nation’ than individuals crucified, their God with them — and then it begins to make sense.

Anna moved to Kosovo last October to work for Catholic Relief Services, Nick joined her in January. They were evacuated as the bombing began and their e-mails from then on regularly reduced me to tears. On Maundy Thursday, as Anna waited for news of her Kosovar friends whose fate she could only guess, while thousands of refugees, their lives destroyed, fled into Macedonia and Albania, she told me “I can see the significance of Good Friday, Easter seems a very long way off”. Is this where God is in the Balkans? A crucified God? Is this all? I find it very hard to believe that God is anything else there — can we try to see this ‘humanitarian disaster’ as part of some greater plan? I don't think so — I don't see how such tragedy can be any part of the will of the God I think I know, but do I thereby render God powerless?

Two weeks ago, Nick and Anna came home for a short break, and we all stayed on the Isle of Skye together. The sheer overwhelming beauty of creation in that place, and the people I was with, made God feel so real. Again I found myself in Paradise talking of Hell — curiously it can be a powerful way of coming alongside God. You must have heard too many stories of tragedy from Kosovo to need any more here, and second hand from me they will have lost the immediacy with which we were drawn into that world. There were crazy stories too — the 72,000 eggs kindly donated by a Croatian charity that Nick had to safely unload from a ship! And there was their determination to return and rebuild Kosovo when the time comes. Perhaps this too is where God is — in hope. Of faith, hope and love, I have always prioritised love (it's so obvious that this is what we must do) with faith coming a close second (how else do we respond to God?), and not been quite sure what to do with hope. Now I begin to see that hope is crucial to the existence of the other two, crucial also to survival for the Kosovars and those who would help them.

It was on Easter day that an email had arrived from Anna in which she suggested that money I was trying to raise might be spent on sweets and toys for Kosovar children: “… they have lost everything and need something to keep them believing in life. I had a beautiful encounter with a child in the middle of the camp …” She explained that they had taken milk into the camp and that “these people who are usually so hospitable and generous were pushing and shoving to try to get at the milk. It took two hours to unload what we had loaded in ten minutes, in order to be able to keep the peace. And people desperately trying to catch my eye (I was sitting on top of the vehicle to pass milk down and to keep an eye on what was happening) to ask for the milk. Very very hard.” But what she found amazing “was how some people managed to keep their sense of humour; one boy who kept blowing me kisses throughout the whole distribution, another small child who kept talking to me in his ten words of English and came and hugged me at the end.”

This article first appeared in Issue 62 of Christis (Summer 1999), whilst NATO troops were bombing Serbian targets and preparing to invade Kosovo.
Kosovo is still under UN and NATO control, whilst legally part of the Yugoslav federation.
More recently, political trouble has flared between Serbia and the last remaining part of the Yugoslav federation, Montenegro, whose government want independence.

It was after that that we started the appeal for toys — the Peace Centre in York have now sent over a hundred boxes of toys via Feed the Children International to the refugee camps. I hope they will breed hope.


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Where is God?

Facing xenophobia in the Balkans