And in Paris they dance

Last week I wrote about the Burmese people’s response to Cyclone Nargis, which has devastated large sweeps of the country and left as many as 100,000 dead. Basically, scholars told me, Buddhists there believe that weather is intimately tied to karma and the rulers’ behavior. When the people in charge do bad things, like round […]

Last week I wrote about the Burmese people’s response to Cyclone Nargis, which has devastated large sweeps of the country and left as many as 100,000 dead. Basically, scholars told me, Buddhists there believe that weather is intimately tied to karma and the rulers’ behavior. When the people in charge do bad things, like round up and beat scores of protesting monks, nature’s fury will visit. You can read that article here.

I briefly contrasted their response with the typical Western questions that arise in the face of natural disasters: Where was God? Why did God allow this to happen?

In a May 19 column, James Carroll, a Boston Globe columnist and thoughtful Catholic writer, provides a stirring response to those questions.


He writes:

” The unpredicted loss of even one life is unsettling, but when tens of thousands of lives are snuffed out in a moment, the pins of meaning itself are removed. Is that all we are – twigs that can be snapped in two by the capriciousness of wind, water, and shifting tectonic plates?

In Burma and Sichuan, each broken body in a ditch was, until recently, a whole universe of thought, desire, love, ambition, laughter, and dreaming. And now it’s nothing? How can that be? The cyclone and the earthquake have attacked the moral order, tooâÂ?¦

But here is the irony. The visceral rejection that humans feel when confronted with large-scale suffering, the innate sense that such meaninglessness is wrong, is itself an affirmation of meaning. An enraged protest at the injustice of the deaths of children is itself a proclamation of justiceâÂ?¦

Resignation and stoicism in the face of suffering are the allies of suffering. When the moral order is overturned by chaotic nature, it is restored, first, by visceral human protest against disorder, and second, by moving immediately to help.

It is said that the ruler of Portugal, after Lisbon was devastated, asked what was to be done? And the answer came, “Bury the dead, and feed the living.” If nature is indifferent to human suffering, humans are not. In this way, meaning is rescued, for humans, too, are part of nature.”

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!