Beyond the "How" to the "Why?"

This week's Gospel link: Luke 13:1-9


2010 has already witnessed the devastation wreaked by two massive earthquakes. On January 12, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake rocked the island nation of Haiti, causing tens of thousands of deaths as poorly-constructed buildings fell on and crushed their inhabitants. Then this last Sunday, February 28, 2010, an even more massive 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck Chile, where the death toll is estimated to be in the hundreds. Fortunately, because of Chile's strict building codes, many buildings have been designed to withstand earthquakes, so total deaths are expected to be much less than Haiti's. Here is a New York Times article about Chile's earthquake.


My seismologist friends can give me a fairly good scientific explanation of how these earthquakes have happened, describing the persistent shifting of earth's tectonic plates. For instance, check out the info at the National Earthquake Information Center. the "how" of earthquakes is fascinating, humbling, pretty scary, in fact, but it doesn't get at the "why." Is there any meaning or significance to be gleaned from these catastrophes, aside from the obvious observation that our terra isn't as firma as we would like, and that there are some things in our world way beyond our control?


In 1927, Thornton Wilder wrote his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in which he created the fictitious tragic scenario of the collapse of a famous suspension footbridge in Peru. The novel was made into a movie in 2004.


The Thornton Wilder Society describes the novel in this way:

Thornton Wilder's second novel, THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, was published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. The plot is deceptively simple: On July 20, 1714, "the finest bridge in all Peru" collapses and five people die. Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary, happens to witness the tragedy, and as a result, he asks the central question of the novel: "Why did this happen to those five?" He sets out to explore the lives of the five victims, and to understand why they died. Ironically, his quest will lead to his own death.


In later years, when someone asked Thornton Wilder about his purpose in writing THE BRIDGE, he replied that he was posing a question: "Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?"

... Describing the sources of his novel, Wilder explained that the plot was inspired "in its external action by a one-act play by [the French playwright] Prosper Merimee, which takes place in Latin America and one of whose characters is a courtesan. However, the central idea of the work, the justification for a number of human lives that comes up as a result of the sudden collapse of a bridge, stems from friendly arguments with my father, a strict Calvinist. Strict Puritans imagine God all too easily as a petty schoolmaster who minutely weights guilt against merit, and they overlook God's Caritas which is more all- encompassing and powerful. God's love has to transcend his just retribution. But in my novel I have left this question unanswered. As I said earlier, we can only pose the question' correctly and clearly, and have faith one will ask the question in the right way."



In this week's Gospel reading, the same sort of question is posed to Jesus concerning the ruthless slaughter of a contingent of Galileans that Pilate considered to be expendable in his program of enforcing Roman Rule in in the first century. 


This week, the blogs in this blogspot are going to be directed to these questions. Is there meaning in tragedy? What sense can we make of devastation? Where is God in all this? Is God in total control of everything? If we blame God for these tragedies, what does that say about us and our theologies about God?