On November 10,
1975 an early winter storm on Lake Superior sank the ore carrier Edmund
Fitzgerald with the loss of the entire crew of 29. The song immortalizing this
tragedy plaintively asks “Does anyone know where the love of God goes…when the gales of November come early”? Recently, the lead story on CNN.com noted “In the
aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, survivors are asking how God could let such a
calamity befall their community”. Same question was asked all over Europe in 1755
when Lisbon was leveled by an earthquake with tsunami and then a city wide fire
on November 1, cascading disasters in which tens of thousands died. Nine years
ago the December 26, 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean caused 230,000 deaths.
The 2004
calamity slaughtered Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Muslim with scrupulous
impartiality in the fourteen countries it afflicted. The leaders of these
assorted flavors of belief were quick to roll out their usual and very
different explanations for the calamity: divine retribution for sin, bad
karma, belief in the wrong idols, the eating of cows, the eating of pigs, evil
past lives, and that old chestnut most popular in our Western chunk of the
world - that an omnipotent, merciful God works in mysterious ways, but….but, no
matter, we’ll get to understand it all, when we meet our Maker in the
afterlife.
It is hard for
us living in cities with noticeable air pollution and with awful “light
pollution” at night to appreciate that we have lost the wonder of a truly dark
sky. If you have had the good fortune to go out West, far from a city on a
clear night, it is a breathtaking view of thousands of stars and the
Milky Way.
In the distant
past, our earliest ancestors looked up from their miserable lot at the then
crystalline night skies, and perceiving an eternal and stately order up above,
imagined that a being or beings much like themselves, only powerful and
immortal, just had be in charge of it all - somewhere out there. Being(s) who
would share their immortality with their devotees, if the faithful but stayed
on their good side with pyramids, prayers, chants and sacrificial victims.
Medieval
astronomers, clinging stoutly to the ancient belief that the Earth was at the
center of an unchanging universe, imagined convoluted schemes of spheres
rotating within spheres to square their increasingly accurate nightly
observations of the planets’ erratic motions with their totally wrong premise.
Now, looking
outward with modern telescopes, we see an incomprehensibly vast and ancient
universe of colliding galaxies, voracious black holes, dark matter, and frozen
moons. We learn from nuclear physicists that the very minerals in our flesh
could only have been forged in the monstrous heat of dying stellar giants that
went supernova, billions of years ago. Looking inward, modern medicine
discovers that a stumbling stew of haywire proteins, not divine wrath, is the
cause of afflictions such as AIDS, arthritis and Alzheimer’s, of cancer and
cholera.
Most of us
instinctively shrink in childlike terror from the frightening abyss that these insightful
observations inexorably lead us to: That reality is random, and Earth is one
place where a one in a zillion long shot has panned out; where a race of
sighted, information retaining, language capable animals has evolved out of the
universal muck and chaos.
But once you
come to accept that we are very much alone in a cold, uncaring cosmos, you can then
cease asking the pointless “Why” about tornadoes, typhoons, temblors and
tsunamis, and accept that all meaning and purpose, all good and evil, reside
solely inside the neurons of our brains. That each of us has but one brief life
to live. And act on the fact that we frail, deeply flawed human beings,
otherwise mere random foam on a chaotic quantum ocean, have in our hearts, and
with our hands, the sole power to create and nurture all the love in the world.
