Miracle in The Andes

by Nando Parrado

‘You are angry at the God you were taught to believe in as a child,’ Arturo answered. ‘The God who is supposed to watch over you and protect you, who answers your prayers and forgives your sins. This God is just a story. Religions try to capture God, but God is beyond religion. The true God lies beyond our comprehension. We can’t understand His will; He can’t be explained in a book. He didn’t abandon us and He will not save us. He has nothing to do with our being here. God does not change, He simply is. I don’t pray to God for forgiveness or favours, I only pray to be closer to Him, and when I pray, I fill my heart with love. When I pray this way, I know that God is love. When I feel that love, I remember that we don’t need angels or a heaven, because we are a part of God already.’ I shook my head. ‘I have so many doubts,’ I said. ‘I feel I have earned the right to doubt.’ ‘Trust your doubts,’ said Arturo. ‘If you have the balls to doubt God, and to question all the things you have been taught about Him, then you may find God for real. He is close to us, Nando. I feel Him all around us. Open your eyes and you will see Him, too.’

I don’t pretend to understand what it is or what it wants from me. I don’t want to understand these things. I have no interest in any God who can be understood, who speaks to us in one holy book or another, and who tinkers with our lives according to some divine plan, as if we were characters in a play. How can I make sense of a God who sets one religion above the rest, who answers one prayer and ignores another, who sends sixteen young men home and leaves twenty-nine others dead on a mountain?

I did not want to live my life as a survivor. I did not want the disaster to define my life.

even in the face of the cruellest kind of suffering, and against all odds, an ordinary person can endure.

‘Even here, even as we suffer, life is still worth living...’