• Tag Archives Haiti

  • Haiti

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                 Waning Moon of Long Nights (New Moon tomorrow)

    The day before the journey.  Not a big journey as things go, but a trip.  Ruthie and Gabe, Jon and Jen.  Family.  As we grow older, family tends to take more and more of our focus.  Why?  Because the work world fades away, home and its memories remain.  This is, I imagine, much as it always has been.  I recall a theory from evolutionary biology that says grandparents were a reason for population increases and longevity increases.  We were around for child care.

    The usual before trip minutiae:  a stuck garage door, cardboard recycling, packing, picking up a connector to make a keyboard usable on the net book.  This and that.

    The death toll in Haiti adds catastrophe to the already multiple problems of a failed state, a failed state within our sphere of influence.  See the Monroe Doctrine.  I’ve not followed Haiti closely so I don’t know the history, how things have become the way they are, but I do know that we have a moral responsibility as a neighbor.

    Acts of God.  Bah, humbug.  These are acts of nature, just like the great Lisbon earthquake in the 18th century.  That one caused a great deal of consternation in various Christian communities.

    “The 1755 Lisbon earthquake (see engraving) created a crisis of faith in Europe and beyond. The catastrophe occurred on a holy day and destroyed many of the city’s magnificent sanctuaries. The destruction caused many to renounce religion; others interpreted the event as a sign of God’s displeasure, thus a sign of His omnipotence. Enlightened souls who considered the world innately good took a jolt. Voltaire contemplated the implications. Immanuel Kant devoted several tracts to Lisbon and its consequences.”

    To read acts of the natural world as anything but what they are is folly.  In Haiti’s case a strike-slip fault–the San Andreas is such a fault–stored up energy since, oddly, about the same time as the Lisbon event, and yesterday a tectonic shift sprung free.  A great analogy in the newspaper compared a strike-slip fault to a person moving a heavy piano.  They push and push and push, nothing happens.  Then, suddenly, the piano moves.  In this instance however the piano then falls on you.

    It is peculiar that we blame God for acts of nature but won’t take responsibility for our own acts against nature, like climate change.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion World History 📎and tagged

  • Theodicy

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                      Waning Moon of Long Nights

    Explanations of theodicy run aground on Haiti, just as they do on the Holocaust, Rawandi, Sudan.  When a nation as poor and crippled as Haiti gets hit with a major earthquake, how does one reconcile that with a loving and just God?  No intellectual fancy footwork can answer that question.

    I’m reading a book sent to Kate by Jon, Children of Dust.  It’s a memoir of a young Punjabi who makes several circuits through various perspectives on Islam from conservative to fundamentalist to ethnic and, I understand, eventually out.  This is the second memoir I’ve read recently, the other being Escape, about the FLDS.

    With this one I have doubts about the accuracy of it.  Memoirs are tricky at best, memory changes as we remember, in fact it changes before it becomes solid memory.  Eye witness accounts are, according to some criminologists, the most unreliable testimony.

    There is, of course, the need all of us to be the heroes in our own story,  the need to smooth out the most raggedy parts of our performance as a human being.  There is a desire to be accepted that goes beyond this tendency to encourage putting the very best light on what we do.  In addition, the most memorable moments are emotionally  highly charged and therefore subject to distortion in the moment, much less over time.

    And each of these can loop back on themselves to create another level of distortion.  That is, I admit my tendency to smooth out the raggedy parts so I show you raggedy parts.  In fact, I may make them grimmer than they were in order to convince you I’m honest, which I’m not.  Anyhow, the labyrinth here is difficult at best.

    Children of Dust is worth a read, perhaps less as a memoir than as an impression of the complex lives Muslims live in contemporary world culture.  It succeeds brilliantly in doing that.


    📂This entry was posted in Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Literature Writing 📎and tagged