In the rubble, a divine spark
Beni Swa Leternel.
Blessed be the Lord.
So the words echoed from the rubble in Port au Prince just hours after a catastrophic earthquake left Haiti’s capital city in ruins.
They resonated, as the grisly scenes of collapsed buildings, buckled roadways, upended fields, flashed across screens, big and small, and the plaintive voices of the innocent victims echoed.
But it was that one line that stayed with me, even as the agonized faces of the dead and the dying, the buried and the trapped, were seared in my mind’s eye, evoking the words of the Kaddish, where even as Jews mourn we praise God and seek solace in the reminder of divine beneficence.
How else to confront the horror, much less to even begin to comprehend Mother Nature’s power to literally cleave open the earth and wreck such havoc and such suffering? How else to find the strength to claw out from the rocks, to dig with bare hands in search of a tiny hand, a foot, a broken body writhing in pain? How else to go on?
Even as Pat Robertson and others proclaimed that the mighty force that opened up the ground could be conceived as a sign of God’s anger, the voices of the people rose in the lyrical Creole cadence parsing songs of help and hope.
And as frantic families fought to find loved ones, the world responded with a humanity that can only be termed heartening with food and water, with rescue teams and emergency vehicles, with dollars and prayers. Humanity reaching out to humanity, reassuring that yes, there is a God, and that, yes, despite the incomprehensible death and destruction wrought, there is good in the world.
The word religion comes from the Latin religio, meaning link. It defines a link, a connection, between the material and the spiritual that since the beginning of time in infinite ways and in myriad traditions has helped to assuage both the hugeness of the world and its vast unknowableness. And especially at times like these, when nature rears up and in a single cataclysmic act unsettles not only the earth but its inhabitants thereof, for many there is no where else to look than up.
So, even as the very real human propensity to evil surfaces, the youths flashing machetes, the looting, the fires, so too the prayers, the songs, the numerous acts of kindness that remind not only of the divine presence that links us this world to the other, but the very divine spark to do good that lurks in us all.
18 Jan, 2010 >
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