The Violence of the World

A long-time Touchstone subscriber sends this response to last week’s Hart-Esolen-Luse exchanges:

First, an observation on the nature of the universe and of this world’s part in it: It is a very violent place both at large and here at home. Dryden’s couplet observes that “nature underneath a jarring heap of atoms lay.........and could not heave her head” without bringing about some catastrophe. We do not know from the point of view of God’s design why this geophysical fact is so. That the nature of the planet itself can be so self-destructive is sobering. Hundreds of earthquakes occur daily, most going unnoticed except by the seismologists who expect these tectonic torsions, the earth rocking on her axis.

We tend to think of nature’s destructive force only around a major event, like the summit of Mount St. Helens disintegrating in an horrendous explosion, or the now widely-accepted theory of the Grand Canyon having been carved out within a short time. These, with the Indian Ocean tsunami, are sure to capture our attention, and to give us pause as to the moment of human suffering.

Yet, nature’s destructiveness is apparent to us in little ways. Houses which are not kept up are taken over by the elements, descending to the realtor’s enthusiastic phrase, “handyman’s dream,” and thence to tinker’s rubble. The forest is in a constant cycle of death and regeneration, according to the alternating strophes of photokinesis. More mundane, grass dies beneath an ignored pile of leaves. In these, the violence of the earthquake and tsunami is absent, though the destructive pattern is there to witness. (Of course, we know also of nature’s renovation following her horrors. Trees are growing again in the fifty-mile radius of Mount St. Helens. So, too, will the shores of the Indian Ocean be renovated by nature.)

The numbers of the dead (especially one-third being children) are numbing, so too the millions of the homeless, the ill, and the suffering. The reasoning mind reels at a tragedy of such stultifying immensity. It demands some sense be made of it, for there to be some outcome which transcends the loss, or gives meaning to the loss, even as though those dead and the imperiled living were in their condition as the result of some higher plan and purpose.

As for good coming from the horror of events in the Indian Ocean, I have been taught, and long experience has confirmed, that when dealing with the nature of our existence and God’s design of nature itself, it always is best to be conservative—not to venture further than revelation allows. This has been the behavior of the Fathers in their writings. The idea of meaning, and of good coming out of the bad, in the Indian Ocean tragedy certainly is the heart’s desire, as the enormity of the loss demands a kind of mental analgesic; it is too painful to think of such loss without meaning, of the lives of the innocents and the otherwise having, or having had, no redeeming value. In fact, such a mental demand is the generous sign of the Christian character in its desire for God’s Charity.

Speculation is a risky business. We need to stay close to the basic knowledge revealed to us. This must seem terribly de minimus. But it’s surely within Christian reason; and consistent with everything we know about the love, that is, the Charity of God.

With the good David Hart, Anthony Esolen and William Luse, I mourn this enormous tragedy, and pray for the recovery and safety of those remaining, as I remember their lost ones before our heavenly Father. And here’s the astounding fact, which replaces all speculation: Our Father, in his mercy, will know how to give meaning to the lives of the innocents lost, and will answer according to his divine will the prayers of the bereft. For as his Son our Savior Christ has said, “In heaven, their angels do always behold the face of my Father, which is in heaven.”

+Joel Marcus Johnson
Anglican Diocese of The Chesapeake