A Passover Reflection

I heard from friends in Japan and they survived the earthquake without injury. Their homes are another matter, but honestly, that was last thing on their minds. One friend was so busy attempting to secure the whereabouts of all the elderly ladies in his neighborhood that he refused to join his husband in the countryside until he was done. Another friend urged folks in his village to come up the hill to his house to get away from the coastline; thankfully, the angle of incidence was such that while the tsunami did indeed pass them, it also passed them by. Being at a right angle, it didn't come up the shore at all. How odd that something so large and terrible could silently pass by. Like the angel of death passing a lintel daubed with lamb's blood.

They have begun to put lives back together there, but very slowly. Another friend disappeared from the radar at approximately the same time, but in the rush to connect with many, I just didn't catch it. She popped up on my screen in the middle of the night a few days ago to tell me she had just returned from her godson's funeral in the Saami area of northern Scandinavia. He and his pregnant Japanese wife were visiting family in a small fishing village on the East coast of Japan. Sadly, it was his white 6'6" frame that made identification swift, and the news spread around the globe through the family. Plane tickets were procured and a funeral was organized. From a fishing village on the coast of Japan to a fishing village on the Arctic Ocean, the tragedy spread farther than any tsunami. The angle of incidence here was acute.

Looking at the Bangkok Post this morning, I saw photographs of tourists being evacuated from Surat Thani, a Thai phrase meaning "City of Good People." Just this morning (at 2:00 AM) we were picking up my friend from his return trip from San Francisco...and while strolling the airport in Bangkok, we passed a man with blond dreads and his brunette girlfriend who I swear was in red pants. They looked exhausted. And were apparently waiting for a flight, but they had no bags, no carry ons, nothing. As my friend has dreads, she and I both noticed him and he stuck in our minds. And here they are in the paper this morning.

And while the flooding (and the earthquakes and nuclear fallout) continue, our lovely hosts in Ban Phu Noi have had to rush off to a family emergency in the south country. It is grave and the outcome does not look good.

It might be easy from the distance of time and mileage to assign this to "just the way life is." When we aren't connected and it's 9,000 miles away, we have the horrible pangs of dread that come from "what if that happened here?" and then, depending on our values, we either put the newspaper down and go back to our lives, or we pick up the phone and call a loved one and check in, perhaps even come up with a plan for donations or getting involved. Some inspired few get on planes, go help, perform medical and financial miracles to bring aid to those in pain and need. But when the thing happening is happening to you it's different. It shouldn't be, I suppose, in a moral and enlightened world that we all might choose to create, but it is. When the radiation of an accident across the world's largest ocean passes over your head, when the damage of a quake in Asia hurts your family in Europe, when the people in disaster photos are sitting in front of you in an airport, and when your friends who have wrapped you in comfort and hospitality must leave you and disengage from all this disaster, even drive through it and tend to their family in private, it becomes personal.

Sometimes I feel guilty for the sensation of "there but for the grace of God go I," but as I clear my head, I realize I am there. I look at my life, I look at the torments, the epidemics and plagues, the deaths I have endured, the challenges visited upon my family, and I realize that just for today, the shadow has passed us by. I feel that helplessness others feel now; I have been there. I have been in the house visited on that dark night. Inasmuch as I have suffered at the hands of cruel fate, or vagaries of time and circumstance, I am more empathetic to those enduring it right this moment. That suffering makes us human, puts us in touch with each other and allows us the opportunity to engage each other in compassion, understanding and respect.

To me, this is the message of Passover, this is the tight place from which I must emerge. I must shed a slavery to a false ideal of everything being "okay." A sentimentalized notion that things were better once, and that it is no longer true. In fact, things are better now because I know what I know and can handle it better, and occurrences--events--have ceased to be sources of trauma as much as opportunities for me to engage with life and be present for all of it.