Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
maycocksean said:
thanks for another thoughtful post. there's so much to respond to, but in the interest of time, i'm just going to focus on this part.
the reason why i focus on tragedy is because it makes frighteningly real for us the precariousness of it all. when great-grandma finally succumbs to pneumonia at the age of 94, well it's sad, but it feels like a "natural" passing. i think, in many ways, we are okay with death. it is a part of life. we've seen grandparents and perhaps parents pass, and we miss them and mourn, but there's not much that feels "unnatural" about it. we have the "why" answered: because people get old, they get sick, and they die. and the cleanness of a "natural" passing is easy for us to digest and fit into a "God's Plan" paradigm.
it's when tragedy occurs that things don't fit as well, and the questions begin to get asked. one thing i think i've tried to do is take both mass tragedy -- the tsunami -- and individual tragedy -- the victims of violent crimes i've mentioned -- and used both to question whatever notions of "God's Plan" might be out there. in regards to the tsunami, inexplicable mass death due to a shifting in the earth's plates seems so sudden, so out of the blue, so unexpected, that it upends any sense of security or normalcy that we have. it is, as many called it, "Biblical" or "of Biblical proportions" -- and i think that's an important word to keep in mind. and it also begged the question of why those who were the most vulnerable -- the elderly, the children -- died in greater numbers. if we were to personify nature, as we do with God, the human quality associated with the tsunami would be cruelty. Holocaust-like cruelty.
when i talk about murder victims, or victims of accidents, or any death that isn't clean and pallatable, it's not such much the end result as Yolland pointed out -- we all die, that's not my issue -- but it is the process by which someone died, and the visual effect of seeing someone who has died in a messy, messy way that, at least to me, reinforces the idea that we are just big bags of water on a rock that's floating through outerspace. when you see whole lives reduced from living breathing thinking loving people into meat -- or when you see someone's insides on the outside -- it's profoundly upsetting. spend some time talking to EMTs, doctors, police officers, firemen, and once they get past the numbness that they've built up in order to do their jobs, you'll find, in my experience, that there's a piece of them that has, for lack of a better word, died as well. that their instincts, when faced with abject death, is to round up their family and take things like safety very, very seriously, because they know there's no rhyme or reason to the randomness of violent death and no amount of prayer is going to protect you. these people are very keenly aware of the profound randomness of life, and they're all a little bit upended. and many take it upon themselves to impose an order on this messy, messy world, and they do it through the precise professions i've just mentioned.
so ... not sure where to go with this, but i just want to underscore, again, my suspicion towards "God's Plan," and if we are to personify God and talk about relationships, or if we are the kind of person who asks for God's help on a calculus exam, or who thinks that God speaks to them at a U2 concert, or who works under the assumption that every rock they turn over and in every breath they take -- and all anyone has to do is go to TGIS to find some examples of this brand of faith -- that God is there and looking out for them, a co-pilot, then i think it is incumbant upon them to ask why God is there to help you with your test, but he's not there to stop waves from washing away hundreds of thousands of innocents.
