TSUNAMI MEDITATION ON

A  MEDITATION  ON  TSUNAMI

 

The super charged tsunami of 26^th. December last year that killed 250,000 people and left 2 million fellow humans in horrific bewilderment about their own humanity must have elicited a million more questions about what the God of nature had to do with it. Many others left it to the scientists to explain; yet others preferred to think that silence was the only answer. To say the least, the quake-triggered tsunami was not the result of human negligence or malice, as in a train or plane disaster, but the product of tectonic plate movements on a scale that testified to the still powerful activity of an inhabited and very much alive planet.

While our heart goes out to the victims in prayer, sincere sympathy and material help, we are left in wonderment at the alternating roles of the earth as life supporting mother and heartless destroyer. Earthquakes, however damaging they may be, are, in fact, the flip side (as they, indeed, cause many a flip on the earth’s crust) of the constructive and life inducing phenomena that occur on the earth’s face as a result. For instance, the islands that were buffeted on Boxing Day were themselves produced by undersea quakes - be it millions of years ago – heaved up to the surface to become dwellings of breathless beauty for God’s children, plants, and animals.

          When the tender sympathies will have been expressed, the afflicted have been comforted and rehabilitated mentally and materially, and the advanced warning systems have been installed, and this disaster writ large in the book of prophetic memory, mankind will yet assert that it is good to dwell on an earth that is alive and vibrant, charged with the potential for further evolution by an omnipotent and providing Creator. A scientist who programmes a silicon chip to provide information of a hundred years’ projection is but a nanometre analogy of a God who programmes his universe to produce life and the human brain by the interactions and environmental adaptations of lively matter.

          That is what creation is all about: not a once-and-for-all Big Bang (if there was one), but the continual renewing of the conditions for life in defiance of death’s annihilating power. This means that there is a struggle at the heart of every creative endeavour. God does play by the rules. He set up the thermodynamics that give us the mountains, earthquakes, tsunamis; and yet those same laws of physics and chemistry allow for a human brain capable of calculating thermodynamics, and of understanding – albeit imperfectly – how to recognise, and avoid, the dangers of living on the Earth. The same God respects cause and effect, and is reliable enough for us to be able to read into his universe with confidence, predictability and some comfort. God is present; and we don’t understand, and yet we are capable of realising that we don’t understand. That is the strangest mystery of all.

          The spirit of man can only bow in humble adoration of a transcendent God who gives a living universe to man, but who also lovingly bears his pain in every tragedy, empowers him to help his suffering brethren, and remains steadfast in his assurance that “all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.”