When you least expect it — very bad things can happen
Every last one of us lives daily on the cusp of cataclysms. It’s a truth as old as humanity and yet ridiculously easy to forget, as we mostly manage to do every day.
Pop singers and prophets alike warn us.
Here’s Paul Simon’s 1977 version, called “Slip Slidin’ Away”:
“God only knows, God makes his plan The information’s unavailable to the mortal man We work our jobs, collect our pay Believe we’re gliding down the highway When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away”
Another Paul, St. Paul, issued a similar warning a couple of millennia earlier: “While they are saying, ‘Peace and safety!’ then sudden destruction will come upon them like labor pains upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.”
As I write this I’m still compulsively scanning the news from the Middle East.
On Oct. 7, the Palestinian militants called Hamas launched a catastrophic surprise attack on Israel.
The news stories and videos have been gut-wrenching. If you’re not sickened and appalled, you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.
An all-night music festival in the desert, billed as celebrating “friends, love and infinite freedom,” turned into a slaughter.
At least 260 bodies were recovered from the concert site the next day, the Washington Post reported. More celebrants were wounded. Women were raped and beaten.
Other festivalgoers were kidnapped, including university student Noa Argamani, who can be heard on a video begging pitifully for her life as terrorists drive her away on a motorcycle, to God only knows what fate.
Elsewhere, there’s footage from a kibbutz of four apparent civilians, including what looks like an old woman, being marched along as captives. A second video shows the four just minutes afterward, sprawled in a street, apparently dead. (See: tinyurl. com/yftp45xf) There’s much, much more. Minutes before disaster struck, these victims had no idea what was coming.
And now, nobody knows what further violence could result. Israel continues to retaliate. The clips of devastation in Gaza are heart-rending, too.
Another surprise attack on Israel 50 years ago almost to the day — the start of the Yom Kippur War — almost tipped us into nuclear armageddon. (See: tinyurl.com/2p95p6cb)
It’s not in any way trivializing the ongoing horrors in the Middle East to point out that all of us are equally vulnerable to our own private apocalypses.
A longtime buddy of mine went to see his doctor about acid reflux. He came home with terminal esophageal cancer.
Someone else sets out for the convenience store to pick up a lottery ticket, and gets t-boned by a drunken driver. I knew a guy who lost his parents and both his nephews to one such drunk.
What does good religion say to us at times such as this — and at all times? Plenty, actually.
I specify here “good” religion. There’s such a thing as destructive, toxic religion, too, and it can infect any sect. But here, I’m talking about the other type of faith.
What good religion mainly doesn’t do is blithely explain why wars and cancer and car wrecks happen. They just do, it suggests obliquely. That’s where we live.
And there are things good religion does tell us more plainly. Things I find helpful in the scary moments:
It urges us to remember that our lives are but vapors, here momentarily and then gone. That perspective keeps us humble. It teaches us compassion for those who are suffering, because we know we, too, will suffer eventually. It reminds us to make each day that we do have count. It makes our suffering more bearable, because it reminds us no difficulty can last long.
It tells us to not be consumed by hatred and vengeance, because those are the forces that produce wars and murders. They also lead to our own self-destruction. Instead, we’re to become peacemakers. We’re to break the chain of violence. We’re to try to lessen the world’s misery.
It tells us not to be consumed by fear. “Don’t worry about tomorrow,” Jesus said. “It will have enough difficulties of its own.” I think he meant we can be assured we’ll have problems in the future, maybe very bad problems.
But we shouldn’t waste the good things happening today by fretting over a future we can’t foresee or control. Sure, we ought to plan wisely — buy health insurance, whatever — but sooner or later something bad will get us. It’s inevitable.
It says that life has meaning. As random or vicious as the world can appear, good religion says there’s a greater, and loving, power ultimately at work. We may never know why awful things happened quite as they did, but life isn’t in vain.
It says that no matter what we go through, God endures it with us, because God cares. It adds that, in any case, this life isn’t the end. There’s more. We don’t know exactly what shape that afterlife will take. But we can hope in our future, right in the maw of today’s pain.