What's Good About an Earthquake?

This post is in no way intended to trivialize the incredible suffering which has been experienced by victims of the Japan earthquake and tsunami and their families. My family and I were living in Simi Valley, CA when the 6+ Northridge quake hit in 1994. The damage was nothing like what just happened in Japan, but it was substantial enough that empathy comes easily.

On the other hand, there are few things so bad that some good can't come of them. The positive side of tragedies such as this must not go unnoticed.

First, the easy and obvious: In the midst of great difficulty people discover resources - of courage, emotional strength, compassion and charity - that they otherwise would never have seen in themselves. No great insight there.

Perhaps more profound is the fact that intense troubles compel most people to rethink their priorities, and in so doing we discover how really insignificant our differences are compared to our common, intensely human needs.

I will never forget something wonderful that the Northridge quake brought to our neighborhood. In a matter of minutes, several dozen of us were huddling together in our bedclothes in the middle of our tiny street, as far as possible from anything that might fall down. At that moment, there were no conservatives or liberals, no dogmatic humanists or fundamentalists, no divisions according to skin color. Even the common little antagonisms that sometimes exist between neighbors were completely gone. Instead, there were just real people finally expressing what really lies almost always beneath all of our posing and posturing: childlike dismay.

The word humility, like the word lust, is used too often in conservative churches and not enough everywhere else. But as painful as it may seem, it is downright healthy to have the earth shake under our feet, thus reminding us that most of what we depend on for a sense of well-being is makeshift and temporary at best.