Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?

It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory.  At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco.  I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility.  I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!)  just this morning.  The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan?

Let’s start by experiencing the disaster just a little bit.  The clip below is one of the first live reports of the wall of water and debris engulfing the flat land bordering the sea in Miyagi Prefecture north of Tokyo.  I don’t expect you to watch all 18 minutes, but take it at least through the first four or five, remembering that every house, every vehicle being swallowed has people in it.

[Click here to go the clip - embedding has been disabled.]

My first reaction to this is that Hollywood’s disaster flicks don’t come close to duplicating the real thing.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything even in fiction like this monster as it races across the landscape, belching smoke and flame, swallowing everything in its path.  My second response is similar to how I feel when I stand at the base of Niagara Falls – very small and inconsequential.   Look – everything human is being obliterated.  Our greatest works hardly slow it down; instead, as human artifacts are swallowed they become part of the monster, swelling its size and increasing its power to destroy.  There is powerful metaphor here – read on.

This 20 minute disaster by itself is enough for a lifetime.   But this is only the middle act of a three-part tragedy.  To this we have to add, on the front end, approximately three minutes of the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history, and on the back end a still unfolding nuclear disaster whose effects could last from decades to centuries.

Now would you like the really bad news? This is happening in Japan.

This is one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced countries in the world.  Japan is not only the source of many of our cars and electronic gadgets – she is the most prepared-for-disaster country in history.  Japan knows earthquakes as Oklahoma knows tornadoes.  Building codes are possibly the strictest in the world.  Public education, early warning systems, disaster drills:  Everything that could be done in anticipation of a disaster was being done.  There is no way to blame this tragedy on greed (the Gulf oil spill), poverty (Haiti), or political ineptness (Hurricane Katrina).  No – it seems like this is one tragic event that was going to happen and there was nothing anyone anywhere could have done to prevent it or to adequately prepare for it.

An article in the New York Times on disaster preparedness sums up the situation nicely:  No matter how high the levee or how flexible the foundation, disaster experts say, nature bats last.

[Note for international readers: That last phrase comes from the American sport of baseball, in which teams have to take turns at bat, the only time a team can score runs.  The home team always bats last and therefore always has the last opportunity to win the game.   In the great game of life on earth, we human beings are the visiting team, and nature will always have the last say.]

So let’s get back to the original question:  In this situation, where the best that human society can offer is less than inadequate, how should we pray?

First, we need to put God back into the picture. “Nature” is a euphemism – God is the reality.  Nature does not control the movement of tectonic plates, the displacement of billions of tons of sea water.  But God does.  Isaiah 40 might be a useful chapter to run to in these times of trouble and chaos:

²¹ Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
²² He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
²³ He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
²⁴ No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

Does putting God at the center of the Japan disaster make you a bit uncomfortable?  It should.  “Fear God” is a common exhortation in the Bible for good reason – over familiarity with the God of earthquakes and tsunamis is not a good idea.

This leads directly to our second item:

We need to understand our frailty and adopt an attitude of humility. There’s a line I use often in my talks that applies here:

“The entire human enterprise depends on two things: Six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”

No matter how clever our inventions, no matter how beautiful our artwork, no matter how profound our works of literature or how powerful our weapons or how vast our (imaginary) wealth, we are in the end biological creatures who suffer and die quickly without air, food and water.  Our frailty is evident in every disaster – water and food become matters of top priority, and lack of these is often a major reason for breakdowns in security and social norms.  But absent a disaster, we human beings act like teenagers who are invincible and will live forever.  Could there be a better description of an economic system built on the premise that perpetual growth is possible, desirable and inevitable?

Perhaps James’ caution could apply here:

¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.

And we need to admit the reality of our sin and repent. Think back to the image of the tsunami wave racing across the landscape, engulfing cars and buildings and then carrying them along, adding them to itself and using them to consume and destroy yet more cars and buildings.  There is a powerful metaphor here:  All of our economic, political and social structures have been built, like the Tower of Babel on a foundation of arrogance and greed.  We have in fact “added house to house until there is no more room and we live alone in the land” (Is 5).  We have “destroyed the earth” and unknowingly lived on the blood of millions trapped in poverty.   And the system we’ve built for our comfort and prosperity is in the process of destroying us, more slowly but just as effectively as that tsunami wave whose destructive force was magnified by the cars and houses it had swallowed.  (See previous posts that relate here and here and here and here.)

Biblical repentance calls for a change of attitude as well as change of direction.  “Go and sin no more,” says Jesus to an admitted sinner.  Can an entire global society learn to “sin no more”?  I’m not sure we can, but I suspect this is the great challenge of our time.

And this brings us to our one hope in all of this:

We can appeal to the mercy and grace of a God who is not only wrathful but also loving:

¹³ “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, ¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. [II Chronicles 7:13-14]

And while we confess and pray, we can also hang on tight to the words of Jeremiah at one of the darkest periods of Israel’s history that are the source of one of our greatest hymns of prayer and praise:

⁹ I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
²⁰ I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
²¹ Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
²² Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
²³ They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
²⁴ I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”   [Lamentations 3:19-24]

And so I turn from visions of disaster and tragedy to think again of the warbler I saw this weekend, who has survived a long, hard  winter and a flight of thousands of miles, and who spends his morning singing praises to his creator, and mine:

Is it a warbler?  Let me know…

“Old Literature” is an occasional series pointing to works of the past, sometimes well known, sometimes not, that have embedded in them a clear creation care message.  [Check out previous posts in the series here.] C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books are perfect subjects for this series, and have long been on my mental list.  Before I got to him, though, Dean Ohlman at Wonder of Creation blog did the job for me, with a little Isaac Watts and John Newton thrown in for good measure.  Here is his meditation on Narnia – reposted by permission:

Spring is struggling to find her place here in Wisconsin; as the beauty of once-clean snow banks yields to mounds of trash accumulated over the winter months – soon to be followed, we trust, by tulip blooms and robin hatchlings – we pause for another guest post from Donn Ring.  I think I was caught as much by the juxtaposition of a search for lost socks in the dryer (is there a more typical image of our modern human dilemma) while such beauty sits waiting right outside the window.  Enjoy!

In the bleak mid-winter

Frosty wind made moan,

Earth stood hard as iron,

Water like a stone;…

Christinia Georgina Rossetti — written 1872

(a small quince floral clump on the bush above, photographed 2 days ago)

If you live in the northeastern US, the title “weird weather” will not be a surprise.  Or if you lived in the cold south this past winter.  (See “Snow in 50 States – What’s going on?“).  Or if you lived in the UK, Europe, Australia…

This is a summary of current (ie. happening right now) weird weather around the world posted by Brad Johnson at Wonkroom blog yesterday:

NORTH AMERICA Weeks after some of the strongest snowstorms ever to hit the East Coast, another powerful winter storm drenches the Northeast, kills eight people, and knocks out power for hundreds of thousands. Record warmth in North Dakota and Minnesota threatens another year of catastrophic flooding.

SOUTH AMERICA Tropical Storm 90Q, also known as Anita, the “second known tropical cyclone to form in the cooler South Atlantic Ocean,” is circling off the Argentina coast. The first known South Atlantic tropical cyclone, Catarina, was in 2004.

EUROPE “Hurricane-force winds and widespread flooding battered vast swathes of western France and left more than a million homes without power,” as the storm named Xynthia “killed at least 62 people across western Europe” in Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, and Germany en route to Scandinavia.

AFRICA The death toll has risen to 36 people “and nearly 38,000 left homeless when tropical storm Hubert smashed into Madagascar this week.” Last month, stormy weather wreaked havoc across Egypt, as twenty-foot waves crashed into Alexandria and a hail storm killed four people in Cairo.

ASIA “A severe sandstorm hit Xinjiang’s Hotan Prefecture in northwest China on Friday, reducing visibility to zero.” The sandstorms are sweeping across China, and “are expected to hit Taiwan Tuesday.”

AUSTRALIA-PACIFIC Tomas, a Category Four cyclone, is plowing through Fiji, forcing thousands to evacuate. A “beast of a storm” ripped through Melbourne, Australia last week, “bringing with it hailstones the size of tennis balls” and causing $200 million in damage. Meanwhile flooding “which has smashed all the records known” in Queensland peaked in the country’s northeast, “parts of which have been in drought for almost a decade.” Category Four cyclone Ului now hovers off the Australian coast after the Solomon Islands narrowly escaped its wrath.

Those who wonder or doubt the reality of climate change spend a lot of time focused on temperature records and stolen emails.  It might be more profitable to spend that time looking out the window.

Climate change is here.

One of my intentions at Our Father’s World is to create posts that reflect good writing as well as sound thoughts within the general discussion topic of God, creation and our role in creation.  Donn Ring is a friend I haven’t met yet – a man with an eye for beauty in God’s world and a gift that enables him to convey that beauty in words.  Donn sent this email around yesterday, and I have asked him for permission to post it.  Enjoy!

I went for a walk in Middle Wood to welcome the month of July. This Middle Wood is a special place, but visited by few.

In the montane forests of the wilderness West there are the magnificent old growth giants of the lower valleys and the lofty sub-alpine groves that cluster among the broken mountain meadows that descend from spectacular alpine and tundra heights. Most everyone adores the bottomlands with their crystalline cascading rivers, or the pungent copses of weather twisted fir on the high slopes. However, at about the 4000′ (1219 meter) level in the Olympic Wilderness there are transition forests, a rat-tangle of fir and hemlock of smaller size, but still larger than sub-alpine trees — a forest beset by heavy snows and bruising storms that scatter splintered blow-down, and tangled in undergrowth shrubs of ash and mountain azalea and rangy huckleberry. Because of the unbroken density of this forest the heavy snows linger long in their shade, sometimes as late as July. In Spring, to walk through this forest is a nightmare — irregular crusty snow covered with debris and obscuring a thousand booby traps in the hidden blow-down beneath. But that nightmare holds another secret of such startling wonder that every year I must return to witness its fleeting splendor that lasts only 10 days.

The lingering snow of this forest acts as a reservoir, and is close enough in climate and altitude to the spectacular lily displays of the alpine meadows, that Avalanche Lily bulbs and seeds have sloughed downward, populating the highest part of this transitional forest. The snow burden melts in late June or early July, and immediately a lily garden of delicate flowers blooms in such profusion it overwhelms the visual senses. It only lasts a short time, so it is important to monitor weather and snow melt if one wants to see it. This year we hit it dead on.

If you stretch out the picture [above] (taken July 1) for about a mile you can perhaps imagine the overwhelming abundance of delicacy lacing its way through the jungle ruggedness of this storm battered forest — a million, no, two, maybe three, who can count? – these nodding heads of light, so easily crushed, carpeting this battle zone of life that few tourists regard as a destination.

I left the small gravel road that gave me access to the Middle Wood and tried strolling through this profuse wonder. Impossible! I was at a loss. There was no place to put my feet because of the sheer density of fragile beauty. I dared not shove on carelessly. So I found a place where I could straddle a fallen tree trunk and observe the lilies close up at their level with my macro-lens.

There are unplanned delights of tourist-beauty and bliss in chancing upon such a grand profusion. I am a fan of such serendipity. We chalk it up in fragile memory before we hustle on, hoping for some other chance postcard event in life’s limited itinerary. But there are deeper beauties to be perpetually discovered in engaged particularity, a contemplative surrender to the pregnant moment and place. At times it can only be experienced when we intentionally and perhaps ruthlessly halt our frenetic and alien ego journeys that drive us to get somewhere or accomplish some thing. We must drop to our knees or prostrate ourselves or sit in the presence, in stillness, and without preconditions open our being to see and touch and know intimately —  and in that knowing, being known. This is a vulnerable place of close encounter, face to face, essence to essence, being to being, a transformational embrace. It can be frightening for the modern programmed ego to open…and open without the hovering tyranny of prescribed schedules or destinations or benchmarks of material achievement. But once we have begun to receive and understand at this nexus of quiet transparency, however embryonic that mutual knowing, the Whole – yes — the WHOLE begins to grow greater and more integrated in our inner awareness. This is more than a passing event, however pretty. It is fraught with multiple connections and interdependencies and revelations. Thus, we are transformed from a tourist mode of being, careening through life in a perverse maze of imputed and hollow expectations, stumbling upon the occasional unattached postcard moment for our mental scrapbook. We breech the restraining and separating walls and are translated into a profound reality that we are accepted participants in a community and communion of Life that inspires sacramental care and celebration.

Even as a novice, there are grace filled moments when I can find no place to move my feet. Yet…

[Update: The robin watch is over.  Duties called us away for four days, and in that time, all three chicks up and flew away.  Bad timing - but the nest remains for use - next year?]

It’s getting a bit more difficult to follow our daily robin hatchling updates, so we’re changing the strategy a bit.  One post, that we will update with an additional picture or two every day.  We’ll keep the latest picture on top to make it easier to keep track of.

Comments are welcome… !

[Latest Update Day 8, 5/29/2009]

Day 8:

The nest is looking a bit crowded – and we’re definitely not candidates for a beauty pageant yet.  ”So ugly they’re cute” is one way to put it, I suppose.

Day 7:

Eyes are open now…

Day 6:

Finally got a picture of one of those mouths wide open!

Day 5

Five-day old hatchlings are now clearly showing signs of feathers growing in.  They have about filled the nest, meaning they are perhaps three or four times the body mass they were when they hatched less than a week ago.  Their two parents – I can’t tell who is Mom and who is Dad – have pretty much a full time job going back and forth to feed them.  However, I suppose because of our relatively cool weather right now (in the 50’s this morning) most of the time when I examine the nest they have heads buried under each other.

Today’s picture …

Day 3

Day 3 of the great Wisconsin Robin watch… we’re growing fast (compare the size of these hatchlings with yesterday’s post). [Picture date 5/24/2009 3:24 pm.]

Day 2

A third hatchling has joined the other two.  Picture as of 8:20 am May 23, 2009.  (What happens to the eggshells?  Any ornithologists out there?)

Day 1

Two of three baby robins have hatched, as of 1:20 pm on May 22.  (First post on this story is here.)

The Nest (the day before hatching begins):

Right outside my backdoor is a light fixture.  Hasn’t worked for a number of years, doesn’t seem to feel like a priority to fix it right now.  Just as well – a pair of robins have decided this is a great spot to raise their children.  Sheltered from the rain, relatively protected from predators.  The only real disadvantage seems to be these pesky humans who will keep coming in and out of the door below.

Anyway, watching these eggs turn into birds and fly away in more or less real time seems like a fun thing to break up the monotony of words for a while.  So here’s what the nest looks like on this date – May 19, 2009, at 9:45 am CDT.

Stay tuned!

Five-day old hatchlings are now clearly showing signs of feathers growing in.  They have about filled the nest, meaning they are perhaps three or four times the body mass they were when they hatched less than a week ago.  Their two parents – I can’t tell who is Mom and who is Dad – have pretty much a full time job going back and forth to feed them.  However, I suppose because of our relatively cool weather right now (in the 50′s this morning) most of the time when I examine the nest they have heads buried under each other.

Today’s picture (previous posts – click on the “robins” tag)…

]]> http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/05/26/spring-in-wisconsin-robin-watch-day-6/feed/ 0 http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/05/24/spring-in-wisconsin-4-growing-fast/ http://www.ourfathersworld.org/2009/05/24/spring-in-wisconsin-4-growing-fast/#comments Sun, 24 May 2009 22:30:01 +0000 Ed http://www.ourfathersworld.org/?p=194

Day 3 of the great Wisconsin Robin watch… we’re growing fast (compare the size of these hatchlings with yesterday’s post here). [Picture date 5/24/2009 3:24 pm.]

Here’s an elargement showing essentially undeveloped eyes and (very developed) beak on one of the three chicks:

A third hatchling has joined the other two.  Picture as of 8:20 am May 23, 2009.  (What happens to the eggshells?  Any ornithologists out there?)

Previous pictures: Hit “Robins” on the tag list…

Two of three baby robins have hatched, as of 1:20 pm on May 22.  (First post on this story is here.)