Water, Water Everywhere

Nearly all human cultures have a legend about a great flood. This is hardly surprising as originally most humans tended to settle in coastal areas or on the banks of a river or lake. Therefore at some stage the river has risen or the sea has swept in and in ancient non-global times the whole known world of a community was flooded.

Humans have always sought a reason for these seemingly unpredictable disasters. We had obviously sinned and strayed from the path of morality in the eyes of the acknowledged deity and so god had to cleanse his creation and allow his people to regenerate themselves in a new purified form. Lack of a written history blunted the detail and the perceived punishment was – with time - seen to be uniform and just. We would pray and try harder to live the good life.

I, like many others, have been sitting in front of the TV watching BBC World and Sky News showing the appalling scenes coming out of Asia. Instant visual coverage in the wired global village show the suffering inflicted by the tsunami to be a grim lottery; there is no grand plan to correct evil and allow the chosen few to go forth in righteousness. Families have been torn apart. Children swept from their mother’s arms. Others have found themselves kilometres from where they were with little recollection of how they got there. Scenes of people burning the bodies of their relatives whilst others search through the ruins of their homes and lives have been relentless. The mind shuts down as the scale of the disaster and associated suffering is too large to comprehend.

So to say or even think that this is part of a deliberate plan by God is vile and obscene in the extreme. A report showed a priest standing in front of his church saying that he would not be able to explain the reason for this to his people was an honest exclamation.

We must realize that we humans are biological systems that creep and crawl upon the face of the earth like all other life and are subject to the same forces of nature. We have no recourse to any authority. We cannot buy our safety by ‘living in harmony with nature’ as the environmental evangelists now proclaim. The wilderness is always close at hand and whilst is can be understood it will never be controlled.

We have simply ourselves for succour and comfort when the time comes.