Earthquakes

I woke up this morning to hear that the US Senate had lost its filibuster-proof majority by a major upset election in Massachusetts. That, I thought was upset enough to put me in a thoughtful mood. But to my dismay that would not be the big upset. No, the real news item was an earthquake in Haiti. Old news, you say? We did that last week .  Such devastation: there is no describing the human suffering that has swept over that poor island nation. Only today’s story is about another earthquake in the same spot, the dreaded after-shock quake we have often heard of. This one a mere 6.1, compared to the 7.something that hit there a week ago. Sounds pretty bad, nonetheless, and with the capitol of Port-a-Prince in rubble, surely another disaster of major proportion.




Now I have been in Port-a-Prince, and I have been in a major earthquake. Perhaps that makes me a little more sensitive to such a news item. Yet that was more than fifty years ago.  That hardly counts for today.  But honestly, does one need to have had such personal experience to be sensitive to the plight of the Haitians? The face of human suffering is timeless and not hard to recognize. The tear-streaked cheeks, the dried blood and sometimes not so dry, the crippled limbs, the maimed bodies, the uncountable corpses, the nobodies who all had once lived and breathed and worked and loved and worshiped and prayed and laughed and danced are no more. What beauty, what intelligence, what creativity, what vision, what dedication to that frail thing called hope that stirred those unknown nobodies: lost, irreparably lost. Mankind is diminished. Weep. We all must weep. We have been robbed once again by a force we could not defeat, we could not even protect ourselves from it. Not finally. What a way to start a new day.



The political earthquake in Massachusetts rose up just as suddenly, as earthquakes and fires and floods and terrible winds are wont to do.  There’s not much to be said. Much will be said, however, and with fervor and an air of omniscience by those who will claim they knew this was coming, knew it had to come, and will explain it all to us with maddening logic. But what matters it now what was known and what unknown, the shifting of political tectonic plates are as invisible to the naked eye and unsearchable to the most competent of human minds as the moving rock deep beneath our feet. We live on moving ground and we must make the best of it.



So I am incredulous at the report of a prominent TV evangelist announcing to his followers that what has happened to the Haitians is their own fault. That a loving and compassionate God who wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus can have perpetrated this disaster on a struggling, poverty stricken nation whose one sin was to want to be free. Of course, he didn’t put it that way: no, apparently he has some inside information about a pact with the devil two hundred years ago for which the nation is now paying the price. Where evidence of such a pact can be found, I have no idea. That such a pact is even possible is questionable in the extreme. How can an entire nation make such a pact? The notion is ludicrous. And even if one could make a case for this outlandish idea, would it not have to be pretty much the case of every aspiring group of people longing for freedom? Did we not break away from our former rulers, as the Haitians did? But we were God-fearing, will be claimed. We made no pact with Satan. Certainly not, yet to the outsider, what would have been the marks of distinction between us and the Haitians? That we thrived and they did not?



I’ve read somewhere that history is written by the winners. Another way of putting it might be, history is written the way we want to believe it, and I am not immune to this desire. My dismay at facing a new day with agony of heart and confusion of mind arises from the immutable fact that life will not behave itself according to my opinions and expectations. There will be setbacks, tragedies, disasters. And there will be those who don’t even call it that. For every defeated enemy a rejoicing winner will celebrate, and for every ear of corn that has been robbed its drop of rain beneath a dry and copper sky, another will swell its sweetness from the moisture that is gratefully sucked up from the rain-washed ground. Who tells the story? Who will teach us how to discern, how to care?



These are the thoughts that crowd into my mind as I get myself ready to face another day. The earthquakes will subside, the rubble will be cleared away, life will go on, and someday, somehow, those who have been lost will be forgotten, replaced by new sprouts of life, eager to bear new fruit for a hungry world. For now, I am left wondering why I think of all these things, and why I feel driven to write it down.