By now we’ve seen the photos and the videos; we’ve read the interviews. In the video I watched, the thing came bearing down unstoppable, a thick, gray column, opaque and faceless, an all-powerful horror.
Forty minutes isn’t terribly long, but it was more than enough. It left a swath of destruction that staggers the mind: a town leveled; indiscriminate mounds of lumber and twisted metal; cars inverted and resting on one another; homes refigured as splintered shells, as flat, spaceless nothing.
And while this mess presents as impossible task, another horror registers: How to find people? How to know where they are? Which piece to pry, lift, move (at the risk of other pieces moving, collapsing, crushing) to get at the lives that are trapped underneath?
The numbers begin: 91 killed, 20 of them children– as of this morning.
It leaves one feeling helpless. What can one do? On-site, resources are limited as it is, and what would be the good of my descending on it all– even with every good intention to help, arriving replete with compassion and inexperience?
We can send money, give blood. Make donations. Pray.
But it doesn’t feel adequate.
The images and the news are haunted by other images, other news. Do we not automatically make the connection? The Plaza Towers School and the children inside, bringing to mind Sandy Hook. The rescue workers moving carefully over the wreckage, bringing to mind a garment factory in Bangladesh.
How to speak into this loss, this reminder of our terrible fragility?
Today’s New York Times quoted this tweet from someone stricken by the disaster, coming away from where his house once stood: “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” he said.
He can say that in this instance– but no one unaffected could.
The challenge of that quote, biblical as it is, is that it seems so unfeeling, so insensitive, so given to promoting the notion that the all-powerful God is also a cruel God, one who could stop a faceless tornado, a crazed and gun-toting young man, the imperfect architecture of a garment factory from crumbling to the ground– but doesn’t.
So it is helpful to remember– especially today, and on all the days like this one– that He isn’t cruel. It’s helpful to remember that the worst kinds of cruelty are the ones He allowed to be inflicted on Himself: losing His own Son, betrayal, abandonment by his friends, torture of the worst kind, excruciating death.
And also bearing the sins of the world and all its pain– all of the loss that had come before, and all of the loss to come after.
This includes the Holocaust– which is enough of a horror-show of suffering to give us all pause.
My aunt and father were talking about it once– the Holocaust and the inconceivable suffering. My aunt asked my father: how could God handle it? What would the Almighty do in the face of such pain?
My father’s answer: He heard their cries one person at a time.
“Aren’t two sparrows sold for a penny? But your Father knows when any one of them falls to the ground.”
If sparrows, so common, are so dear to Him, what, then, of people?
He heard their cries one person at at time.
As he heard and still hears the families in Newtown.
As he heard and still hears the people of Bangladesh.
As he hears the people of Moore, Oklahoma.
