One world: Of earthquakes and interdependence

As Americans were complaining about all the snow this winter, arguing about the value of NPR and PBS, and learning that we suffer from an “enlargement of self,” the Japanese were dying by the thousands as solid ground gave way and the sea roiled and raged, consuming whole cities.

The raw, elemental power of nature can shake us from our
preoccupations like nothing else. (Though a few million of us will
obsess about Division 1 basketball over the next few weeks–the men’s
game, of course, never the women’s–elevating it to an importance
that borders on the obscene).

The indiscriminate destruction caused by earthquakes and tsunamis messes with our sense of cosmic justice. It shatters
our romantic views of nature and of divinity–the silliness we often
succumb to when we credit God with a beautiful sunset or a striking
cloud formation. It silences, thankfully, if only for awhile, the bad
theology of Everything Happens for a Reason. (That the Japanese are the
only people to have suffered a nuclear attack and are now at grave risk
for prolonged radiation contamination is a particularly cruel irony that
ought to leave us in stunned silence).