History's Happening

Sometimes weeks can pass when one barely needs to pick up a newspaper. Often history seems to be a slow moving giant with the inertia of the status quo keeping the known parameters of our world firmly in place for decades at a time. And then, when you are not expecting it, change comes sweeping through the world at a gallop and news is something you need to follow daily or even hourly. These recent weeks have been troubling, exciting, horrifying, and exhilarating in turns. Demonstrations, revolutions, and civil war have spread across the Arab world like a virus. It was hard to tear oneself away from following the events in Tunis and Cairo unfolding at a thrilling pace. But no sooner did those headlines fade than another half-dozen countries seemed to be lurching toward revolutionary change. And then things turned truly ugly in Libya. Not to be outdone, once again, mother nature stole the show with the catastrophic disaster in Japan only to see the potential for nuclear disaster overshadowing even the worst of natural catastrophes. And all the while, here at home, political upheavals and economic travails go on apace. It’s been an extraordinary few weeks.

On the one hand, in times like these, when massive movements and events are happening, we are reminded of how small and even trivial most of our concerns and anxieties usually are. When hundreds of people are being swept out to sea or when unarmed crowds are risking lives standing up to tanks and armies, most of our usual preoccupations are dwarfed in comparison. It can be a much-needed perspective. Just a couple of years ago, when I accidentally smashed my little finger under a filing cabinet and my doctor raised the prospect of my losing part of the finger, I was upset and feeling sorry for myself. But when a sat in the surgeon’s office next to a man who had just had his right arm amputated, I got slapped in the face with some perspective. And that was a good thing. My pinky seemed literally not to matter all that much.

This need for perspective is not just a personal thing. In the larger scheme of things, our whole society is doing quite well and all of the anger and rancor that surrounds our national problems seem a little out of place when we turn on CNN and see what real problems and crises look like.

On the other hand, it can be important to realize that the big events that we see and read about are not just big; they are made up of a million little stories about people whose lives are not that dramatically different from ours. When we hear about the massive death tolls in Japan, we need to remember that it breaks down into individual families overcome with grief. These big stories too are just the amalgam of lots of little stories. Every life lost in Libya is someone’s father or son or wife or sister. Every little piece of the big picture is still about someone’s tears or hopes or broken heart or yearning to be free. All of the human family is one gigantic web of hopes and dreams and fears and faith. When part of that human family is plunged into a dark chaos or lifted by a transcendent moment, we all feel it. We are all changed by it. Our own prayers and empathies effect it and are effected by it. That human web is about the spirit of God of which we are all a part. These travails of others are a family affair. And so, perhaps, our spiritual lives are at stake as we ache and pray and cry and exult with others halfway around the world. We are them, and they are us, and our common spirit of God pulls at our souls when this great web is tugged by the seismic shifts of history. Our God is on the move, and so we are as well.