8/5/2012
POEM, “Fault
Line”
California
is so many things, but it’s hard to think about California without thinking of
earthquakes. The San Andreas Fault and its handiwork is plainly visible. Research has shown that the Southern segment,
which stretches from Monterey all the
way down to the Salton Sea, is capable of a Richter scale 8.1 earthquake. An
earthquake of that size on the Southern segment (which, at its closest, is 40
miles away from Los Angeles) would kill thousands of people in Los Angeles, San
Bernandino, Riverside, and other areas, and cause hundreds of billions of
dollars in property and economic damage.
Isn’t is
great to live in such a safe part of the country?
Maybe..……in
November 2008, The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency warned that a
serious earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone could result in "the
highest economic losses due to a natural disaster in the United States,"
further predicting "widespread and catastrophic" damage across
Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri,
Oklahoma, Texas, and particularly Tennessee, where a 7.7 magnitude quake or
greater would cause damage to tens of thousands of structures affecting water
distribution, transportation systems, and other vital infrastructure.[22] The
earthquake is expected to also result in many thousands of fatalities.
Maybe, we
all live on the edge, but Californians just can’t deny it.
As writer
Alice Gregory notes upon moving East:
In California, you know when you’re
burning. The brightness hurts, and when you close your eyes, you see red. The
cliffs are high and jagged, the ocean smashes the shoreline, and landslides
really can bring you down. There you are dwarfed and powerless. There are
earthquakes; and mudslides; and for about three months of the year, entire regions
of the state threaten to spontaneously combust. You wouldn’t dare sleep naked
in California—you might need to run outside in the middle of the night,
awakened to a rattling house and a mile-deep fissure in your front lawn.
We love to
watch the Olympics for many reasons, not the least of which is that moment of
suspense and the drama of the competitors’ expressions of joy or defeat.
Vicariously, we relive our own near-triumphs and empathize, or imagine the
glorious moment of victory and feel envy or admiration. I love the synchronized diving and the moment
the divers poise on the edge of the board. Every muscle of their bodies must be
perfectly attuned, and to my way of thinking there must be a spiritual as well
as a visual/mechanical connection in order for these dives to be so perfectly
harmonized, almost poetic.
But there,
as they pause on the edge, everything is potential: victory, defeat, even
danger, and yet they voluntarily do this over and over again! So, of course, do
we. (CIM)
Each day we
arise is a journey to the edge.
We have only
to acknowledge our own vulnerability to
understand how close we really come.
And I am not
just referring to our physical risk, although that is greater than we
acknowledge, given the way we hurtle down the freeways at enormous speeds,
live, eat, and move in ways that are contraindicated for longevity and comfort;
and all of the many toxic and violent threats of modern life. I am also
referring to what I am just going to call our own theological fault lines. Those potential rifts and separations that
we pretend not to observe, that we neglect at our own expense. You can only
live deceptively and selfishly for so long before it begins to consume you. You
can see these upheavals in peoples bodies and faces.
When our USA
men’s diving team was waiting to see whether they would win a Bronze medal or
no medal at all, their reactions were so different. The younger man (age 17)
was fraught with anxiety. The older of the two, who was actually more on the
edge in this case, since he is 34 and would not have another chance to ever win
a medal, was smiling. He looked okay to me. He stayed with the younger guy even
though he preferred to not watch the other results. I actually have no idea but
I would like to think he was at peace because he had done his best. If you
watched TV at all this week, you probably know, they did win the bronze medal.
Here is my
point.
Whether we
acknowledge it, live in denial, glimpse it from time to time, we are all living
on the edge. There is really so little separating us from huge loss and
disaster. (mention Colo, 4th anniversary of Knoxville, etc…) When we
know this, we have a choice. We can
figuratively grasp and compete and consume one another, acting as if
nothing but our own survival, winning, getting through, surviving , the “bottom line,” how things come out, and
fixing everything that is wrong is really what it’s all about. You may have
guessed by now that this is not what I would recommend theologically.
However, I
see people acting this way every day, as if the product were more important
than the person. Yes, even Unitarian Universalists. Sometimes, even myself.
But when I
meditate upon the edge, the fault line of my own existence, spend some time in
that land where we all live theologically, where no one finally survives, then
I know the answer is love, respect and decency for every human I encounter, and
I can return to other humans, regardless of how hungrily they may be licking
their chops, with kindness and regard.
C.S. Lewis talks with one of his
college students about
why we love if losing hurts so much, Lewis who lost his mother as a
child and his wife as an adult,
responds, “I have no answers anymore,
only the life I have lived. Twice in
that life... I've been given
the choice: As a boy... and as a man.
The boy chose safety. The man
chooses suffering. The pain now is
part of the happiness then. That's
the deal.”
Taking this
to a universal level we can look to Joanna Macy, Buddhist teacher and
eco-feminist. Macy states that feeling
that one
must always be hopeful can wear a
person out, but if we just show
up, and be present, do not pull down
the blinds, the possibilities
exist that the world will heal. She
believes there is a new paradigm
occurring that is known as “The Great
Turning.” The Great Turning
is a concept she helped coin and
define. Macy calls The Great
Turning “the essential adventure of
our time: the shift from the
industrial growth society to a
life-sustaining civilization.” She
says it is a time of transition from
a bankrupt political society,
which measures success by growth and
profit and is being replaced
by moral strength, courage and
creativity. The generations alive
today may not see a drastic change in
their lives or environment
but the choices we make for profit
today will effect the beings in
the next hundreds and thousands of
years and determine whether
they will be born of sound mind and
body.
So when we
feel ourselves in those places of fear and anxiety, let us turn toward one
another with love as the first principle, and we will find our way.
The shifting plates, the restive
earth, your room, your precious life, they all proceed from love, the ground on which we walk, together.
