Acts of God, Acts of Man

The devastation in Southern Asia has put a damper on normal activities. It's difficult to get worked up about after Christmas sales, the latest movie releases, Year in Review TV shows, football bowl games, parades, or any of the other staples of American life. The gut-wrenching images on every news channel, faces of mothers who have lost husbands and children, villages leveled and washed away, bodies lined up along the roadside, stick in the mind. It's hard to fathom a single event that wipes out over 100,000 human beings.

I've heard the earthquake and tsunami described as an act of God, but what sort of God would unleash such a disaster on some of the poorest people in the world? What sort of God would wipe out entire families, entire villages?

Acts of man, like 9/11 for example, are easier to understand and explain. Though twisted and diabolical, Osama bin Laden and his followers made very clear why they attacked the United States.

What can one say about the earthquake and tsunami except that this is what the earth has done for millions of years -- before humankind appeared -- arranging and re-arranging itself, throwing up mountains from the sea, sinking land masses, tearing continents apart, freezing parts of the land and turning others to dry desert.

I went to the grocery store yesterday, found it crowded with people buying food and libations for New Year's Eve parties, and felt guilty as I filled my own cart with necessities and luxuries. How easily I lifted two gallons of drinking water into the cart! That amount of clean water could spell the difference between life and death for a Sri Lankan. It felt strange to be going about my business, buying the things I usually buy, while people on the other side of the globe suffered brutal deprivation. I also felt utterly helpless.

It is gratifying to see the outpouring of aid and assistance flowing into the region. The disaster offers a tremendous opportunity for people to work together, cross ethnic, cultural, and religious canyons, put aside differences in language and skin color and see that life on this planet is one, all connected, all interdependent.