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Monday, January 3, 2004 Volume VII Number 1

The English derivative comes from the Japanese – which literally means harbor wave.  Dare to live on the waterfront long enough and you will soon discover why the coastline is rocky and weather worn and a living monument to erosion.  The shoreline is the point of collision where that giant mass of water meets the good earth.  Solid ground stands in perpetual resistance against the pounding of the sea; but it gradually gives way.  Only the grand drift of tectonic plates pushing continents upward out from under the sea can push the water back; otherwise the ocean takes the shoreline away one grain of sand at a time in a ceaseless clash of water and loam.  This endless give and take carries on rather harmlessly, until calamity strikes, and those who make their home on the waterfront think again.

Hurricanes and storm surges, wind and rain and tides and solar storms can all impact the shoreline.  And they all do.  But the tsunami is different.  When an earthquake strikes the ocean floor, energy is released.  The traumatic shift at the bottom of the sea pushes against the water and creates a liquid shock wave outward and upward in a concentric sphere.  Picture the circles surrounding the splash of a stone hitting the calm surface of a pond traveling away from the impact in perfect expanding rings moving synchronously toward the water’s edge.  The submerged waves of the quake travel away from the point of upheaval, moving enormous quantities of water in an invisible displacement of mass, a colossal explosion of titanic power, traveling in a torrent of movement across oceans at nearly the speed of sound.

There is a lot of talk now about warning systems.  There’s no doubt, lives could be saved if people were given warning, and if they heeded them.  The history of warning systems, however, is not encouraging.  True tsunamis are so rare that people are only on alert shortly after one hits.  Not long afterward, people forget.  False alarms only diminish the effectiveness of such systems.  Perhaps our more sophisticated technologies will make advanced warnings more effective.  No doubt, after December 26, 2004, new funding will be available in abundance for research and development.

Photographs and videos are emerging from the tragedy.  The tsunami is a silent threat.  An earthquake strikes hundreds, even thousands of miles away.  No one feels it.  The swell of the water way out to sea is undetectable from the shoreline.  It may be a picture perfect morning on beach resorts all along the coast.  As the water builds higher on the surface out at sea, the first impact along the shoreline is surprising, and grossly misleading.  The water is literally, first, pulled away.  My friend Steve gathered some of the photos now appearing on the Internet.  Minutes before the tsunami crashed against the beach, the water actually retreated, leaving beaches exposed.  Harbored boats floating just offshore, tied to buoy lines, sat on dry sand.  The water - gone.  It was as though the tide was out – way out.  Whole marinas were drained of seawater.  Stunned, curious people were drawn out of a sense of mystic wonder toward the beach, looking in astonishment as the entire ocean moved away.  It was an eerily quiet moment of sacred proportions - a tranquil prelude to calamitous disaster.  (How many lost their lives because of their irrepressible curiosity?)

You know the rest.

Within minutes, the sandy beaches were savagely attacked by an unimaginable wall of raging water.  People sitting in ocean-view restaurants, enjoying a late Champaign brunch on a sunny Sunday morning, found themselves submerged as water crashed against the window pane.  But upscale vacationers are only a fraction of the casualties.  In this impoverished part of the world, where there is so little to sustain health and well-being anyway, the catastrophe took children and the infirm and mothers and fathers in a relentless moment of obliteration that will remain as an indelible stain on the collective memory of nations for generations to come.

The devastation is staggering.  The images disturbing.  Once again, as we watch from our comfortable living rooms electronic flickering in muted colors far-away mass graves and bulletin boards of the photos of missing persons and grieving mothers crying out in an unfamiliar language in the utter anguish of unthinkable loss, we know we’ll never really get it.  We can’t smell it from here.  We don’t feel the oppressive heat and humidity or sense the stench of death.  We get an idea, but really, we can only imagine.

One exhausted worker looked wearily into the camera lens and lamented, posing a troubling rhetorical question in broken English - “How do you tell people about a God who knows them and loves them in the middle of all this?”  And he pointed back to the awful scene just behind him.

Everywhere we turn it seems, we are faced with the problem of evil.  And it is a problem.  Why does the History Channel put tsunamis in the “Wrath of God” series?  Why is it that when all is tranquil and peaceful that some stand on the doorstep of a grand vista and think wistfully of Mother Nature and all her wonders – but when Nature turns nasty and cruel, they speak of a vengeful and angry and capricious God?

Philosophers and theologians will do their best to reconcile conflicting ideas.  Some will do better than others.  (I understand that there’s a new thing called “open theism” that lets God off the hook on the whole question of evil.)  Maybe there is an element of justice in calamity.  Certainly, disaster shakes up our complacency and our tendency toward the mediocre. 

But we know this much: the world is a dangerous place.  People get hurt.  People get caught in the crossfire of a world in conflict.  The moment you drop your guard, you are vulnerable.  Come to think of it, you are vulnerable even with your guard up.

We also know this: out of the ashes of absolute tragedy hope appears like a green shoot sprouting upwards from the dust of death.  In the aftermath of this historic moment that will change this part of the globe forever, the world will rally in a relief effort like none other.  Ever.

Many of those who will do the best work, and much of the resources that will fund and fuel relief, will come from those who know and embrace the God who gave his Son as a sacrifice to redeem a lost world, the one who told us that our treatment of “the least of these” (or we might say, the truly needy) will be a reflection of the way we treat him.

For most of my life, we called this part of the world “closed.”  A good friend who has spent a good part of his life working in this same area as a translator speaks of this whole region as “forgotten.”  It is so poor, so slow to participate in the global economy, so burdened by a repressed, regressive world-view, so oppressed by a culture of dark controls that the rest of the world considers it irrelevant.  The developed world is just plain indifferent towards this place, he says.

Well, not any more.

The tsunami has changed everything.

* * * * *

It’s Monday morning.  You are a leader.

It’s the first Monday of the year 2005.  On Christmas day, the word tsunami was hardly in your vocabulary.  Today, it’s been the focal point of much of your conversation.

About a decade or so ago, an influential Methodist thinker used the term as a metaphor of what has happened to his church.  A tsunami has swept over us, he said.  “We have been victimized by a cultural tidal wave that has decimated our churches.”  He made a powerful point.

Back then, Leonard Sweet had to explain to his readers what a tsunami really is.  Today, it’s way more than a metaphor.  It’s a reality.

Maybe, just maybe, our awareness of need has been broadened.  Maybe, with this New Year in waiting, we’ve got a new sense of what’s real.  Maybe, this terrible wall of water has created a new opening.  Maybe, we’ll take it all more seriously.

Or will we?

Posted in Valley Center, California

© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2004

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