Searching for God # 58

For some of us it is impossible to separate what we consider ‘theology’ (the study of God) from what we read and hear in public events. Repeatedly, in this space the matter of privatized sin has been excoriated, believing that notion must be at least balanced by, if not eclipsed by the goal of ‘saving’ the ‘whole world community. The perspectives, focus on the individual versus focus on the global community, are very different.

On Sunday morning, December 21, 2025, on Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square on CNN, David Miliband, former Foreign Secretary in the UK and currently, president and chief executive officer of the International Rescue Committee told the world a startling piece of information.

There are currently 250,000,000 (not a typo) people facing extremely dire circumstances from a variety of issues, war, disease, poverty, climate change and global warming, at the very time, according to him, that ‘foreign aid’ has been drastically cut, not only in the United States but in the UK, France, Germany…and perhaps others.

What Miliband nor Zakaria did not mention is that at the same time the military budgets of those same countries has been and continues to rise dramatically. For a limited brain, living under a rock, in so far as detailed, intimate knowledge of geopolitics, international relations and private conversations between decision-makers in public life are concerned, I can’t help but shudder at the implications of  both the timing and the attitudes of the convergence of these two pieces of information.

The word ‘existential’ is deployed often by nations like Israel in her ‘existential’ conflict with Iran, for example, where there is considerable evidence from Iran that at least the Revolutionary Guard and Iran’s proxy terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah blatantly, publicly and vehemently seek the eradication of the state of Israel. Existentialism, as a thought-package, implores the individual human to become aware of his/her own meaningless, and to take responsibility for inserting, injecting and embodying meaning and purpose in his/her life. The ‘existential moment’ is defined as that moment in which the individual becomes acutely aware of this ‘perception’. Whether those writers who have espoused existentialism believe in God or not, they share this singular premise.

In the case of Israel, the word has serious implications not only for the human beings living there, but also for the foreign and military policies, as well as the domestic policies of the government. In other situations, Haiti, or Perhaps even Cuba, or perhaps Pakistan, or Syria the word ‘failed state’ is used in diplo-speak, as a designation of desperate-to-non-existent governance. In such cases, the identification of the problem is discerned as ‘internal’ rather than coming from a force outside.

Miliband’s plea, echoed here from a theological perspective, is that the world is, or already has, turned its back on so many millions of people, (and we add, turned its attention to national security and military preparedness) simultaneously at very great risk to the whole world. Vaccinations, medical and health care, education and various food programs are at the heart of the foreign aid that has been cut by at least 90%, at the same moment the need is most acute.

It is easy and glib to scream at the trump administration for what is heartless, short-sighted, narcissistic white nationalism, given the cataract of heinous headlines generated from the Oval Office, as a campaign not only of deceptive propaganda, but as a deliberate state practice of deflecting, and effectively blinding the world from the wanton and deliberate attempt to leave the helpless to die, or to be at least deported ‘out of sight, out of mind.’

The world has been watching the devastation of Gaza and Ukraine for months, if not years, while focusing on the conflict between state survival and external incursions, in the case of Gaza in both directions, first from Hamas, and retaliation from Israel. In Ukraine, the inhumanity has come exclusively from the Kremlin, in spite of the false claims that Ukraine, by seeking both EU and NATO membership ‘provoked’ the conflict.

As Zakaria noted in passing on Sunday morning ‘ We speak of states or nations, but these are people we are talking about.’ And therein lies the ‘rub’ where the rubber meets the road, not in some board room or military training school, or some government legislative building. Ordinary human beings, the highest number in human history are clinging to a ‘frayed thread’ for their lives, while mostly men in power continue to shift national budgets toward intense military production, justifying their shift as a matter of national security.

Miliband’s primary point is that the crisis of 250,000,000 starving, dying, clinging to life men women and children ARE the real NATIONAL SECURITY issue for the whole world. And yet, in our inverse direction of the telescope, permitting us to see only the narrow end, we are all complicit in isolation various components of the causes, as well a potential ameliorations of this ‘out-of-sight-out-of-mind’ ‘existential crisis.’

And the word existential applies not only to those millions of individuals, in literal terms, it also applies to the world’s shared deployment of shared resources. Failed states, crop up in international news reports periodically. Groups like the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Oxfam Red Crescent, Save the Children, United Nations WFP (World Food Program), UNICEF for children, UNHCR for refugees and WHO (World Health Organization) for health improvements continue to operate, once again, on vastly ‘cut’ budgets given that their existence depends on the willing funding of national governments.

Just as there already is a convergence of a finite resource of health care machines, doctors, nurses and an almost infinite number of human health crises, where decisions about who and why ‘this’ person receives care over ‘that’ person who is denied care, are we facing, without actually naming and facing it, a similar convergence of both unlimited need and not only limited, but actually constricted resources.

Of course, the headlines will not read, “Massive killings” if and when millions of people die. No single government, agency, philanthropic or international agency will have blood on their hands. And the world will passively, yet complicitly and unaccountably, carry on as if, ‘too bad, so sad,’ but ‘what could I do’?

The world, and especially the news media, ever since 9/11, has and continues to pay great amounts of time and space to ‘terrorist’ organizations, like the Islamic State, or Hamas, or Hezbollah, or the Kremlin even, while the scale of terror, for these 250,000,000 millions of frightened, voiceless, insignificant, silent, starving, mostly illiterate and hopeless human beings never stops.

In most developed countries, little public discussion and debate over international issues is eclipsed by ‘bread-and-butter-kitchen-table-issues’ of cost of living. Getting an education, and then a job, a residence, a family and then an investment portfolio and out-of-country vacations is and has been a template for many. Of course, philanthropic contributions rise and fall with the whims of the local and national economies.

It is the convergence of ‘strong-men-wannabe-tyrants’ and their military agendas, along with their total insensitivity to human vulnerability, weakness, voiceless, and poverty in all of its many forms, with their executive ‘pens’ and willing ‘pawns’ that have put the military-industrial-pharmaceutical-insurance-technological-war-machines on 24-7-365 alert. And the other component of this convergence is the unimaginable mass of humanity that risks losing everything as the hard power of tyranny snuffs out not only their lives but the hope of humanity to hold its collective head high after our shared and predictable and highly probable failure.

So often, we concentrate on both individual and collective sins of commission. Less often do we take note of, and responsibility for sins of omission.

Blindness, willful ignorance, willful deafness from the general population and the allure of highly testosterone-driven, ego-sustained, hard-power-executed sheer dominance of some weak and vulnerable and unprotected ‘other’ from the destestable and ignominious ‘strong-men’ seems like another application of the word existential.

If we are to attempt to find ‘meaning and purpose’ in what is appearing on the horizon of men like David Miliband, as sentient, sensible, spiritual, religious, God-worshipping and God-fearing men and women, it seems we might have to adjust our vision, our perception, our definition of responsibility and even of our alleged faith to include, even to champion those whose collective silence will never be heard in a sanctuary singing Christman carols, or even graduating from college or university, or even finding a mate, a job and raising a family.

The Christian religion makes considerable noise and care for something called ‘the family’. If that family extends only as far as the local neighbourhood, or the local cathedral, mosque, or synagogue, then God’s reach is constricted, repressed, suppressed and perhaps even denied. It is not a stretch to imagine each and every worship centre in the developed world being twinned with another worship centre in the midst of the deepest poverty and starvation and destitution pockets on the planet. Service clubs like Lions and Rotary International have attempted to bridge the world’s various regions, cultures, languages and religions. The churches, however, have apparently ‘dug themselves into fox-holes’ of parochialism, provincialism, deafness, blindness and insouciance.

How does one, including this scribe, reconcile an active search for God while reflecting on a state of the world that any and all deities would have to be weeping morosely to witness? And as humans we all know that we can do better and differently.

Will we?