WHY IN GOD'S NAME...???

The term "natural disaster" threads throughout the fabric of human history. There may be times we think of some friend or relative fitting the description, but that's gaming the language. Mostly it means violent physical phenomena laying waste to land and life.

There are spectacular examples like the 1883 Krakatoa earthquake which shook the entire Pacific southeast. Or China's 1931 Yellow River flood which drowned up to 4 million people. There are the less spectacular but even far more deadly disasters like Europe's Back Death in the 14th C consuming 25 million lives...China's 1950s famine costing 20 million lives...the Influence Pandemic of 1918 whose estimates reach 75 million victims worldwide.

That such natural disasters happen is a given. How we respond is relative to the when, who and where. Perhaps the most complicated part is the how. How we try to understand and live with such calamities. To be sure, the mind and heart of humanity do try! Must try!

Our gut reaction even finds its way into the gainful language of our insurance policies: "Act of god." Yet there are few religions that hold fast to the Ancient Greek and Old Testament divinities punishing mankind with malevolent thunderbolts from above. Rather, they seek to fathom the reason bad-things-happen-to-good-people. Indeed there are many profoundly comforting ones.

More and more, modern science has entered this arena with quantifiable facts of earth and sky which help intellectually explain what we victims find so inexplicable. This is seen as a quantum leap in deciphering ,for example, earthquakes like Vesuvius and Fukushima without reliance on earthquake gods.

Both religionists and scientists agree on this much. In nature there is a reaction to every action. When we mortals gather ourselves together to pick up the pieces and bury our dead, we too must each find a reaction by which to give meaning to the meaningless and purpose to the purposeless.

Enter the great literary minds whose talent is to weave the best of such reactions into their narratives. John Bunyan's PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, Thomas Gray's ELEGY IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD, Thornton Wilder's THE BRIDGE OF ST LUIS REY, and....

...and anything you can find right now to grab on to that won't melt from your tears.