I was in my office a week ago when the venetian blinds began to sway and the desk I was leaning on began to move in time with my heartbeat. By the time I walked through the door to say to Debbie, my PA, "Hey, we've just had an earthquake", David the accountant was fielding a phone call from his relatives in Christchurch, 350 km away and telling us that it was bigger than September and that the Cathedral had fallen over. So for the last week, news has been constant. An app on my iPhone tells me whenever there is an aftershock greater than 4 on the Richter scale and another one delivers the news from Stuff.co.nz. Against the habits of a lifetime, our TV is now turned on when we get up and stays on during dinner.
I see the images of the city where I went to school and university. I look at the grey stone buildings where I first met Clemency and took her out for coffee a lifetime - well, three lifetimes, actually - ago. I see the familiar streets and the cathedral tower beside which I waited for the bus to take me home from that first date and near which I first heard the call to ordination and beneath which I was ordained. Ruined. All ruined and broken and smashed to bits. I look at the people, many of whom I recognise and see their shock and know that some of them may still be lying beneath the familiar stones. One of the first of the dead to have his name released was Don Cowie, who mentored me when I was a new Christian in the New Life Centre. Last Tuesday lunchtime, at his home in Redcliffs, he went outside to pick strawberries and the quake struck and the cliff fell.
I don't find myself asking "why?" for that's a silly question. There is no great theological answer to that; well, there is, but it's subtle and deep and I can hardly see it myself, so I won't try to unravel it here. The simple truth is, Christchurch was made by earthquakes. Two unimaginably big slabs of rock, the Pacific and the Indo-Australian tectonic plates are floating on the top of a vast ball of boiling iron. They move as the currents shove them about: in our perspective they move slowly, but they move with determined and unstoppable force in a great, slow, pirouetting dance that has gone on for tens of millions of years and will go on for tens of millions more. At the place where they meet they push and grind together and force up a crumpled edge which we now call the southern alps. Rain and sun break up the alps and wash them down to the sea where the little bits of used mountain form the flat bit where we built Christchurch, in geological time, a few heartbeats ago. The plates continue to push, move, stick and move again, as they did a week ago, in their perpetual grinding, stumbling dance. And into this ever changing, never fixed movement we humans are born and we live as islands of consciousness in fragile, temporary, breakable bodies.
Over the last couple of years I have had my own impermanence and fragility sheeted home to me, but last Tuesday we, all of us, shared a reminder that we are not here forever and that the stuff we assemble around us to give us the illusion of permanence is as temporary and as fragile as we are. As I look at the images, I must confess that this time, it's not the scriptures or the great poets that have been running through my head, but a song by Ingrid Michaelson.
Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess,
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess
And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys
And you fasten my seat belt because it is the law
In your two ton death trap I finally saw
A piece of love in your face that bathed me in regret
Then you drove me to places I'll never forget
And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys
And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys
There is something else. Something Ingrid Michaelson may not know or believe and I will talk about it later, but I want to just signal it here. Our fragility and impermanence isn't the end of the story. There is an immense mind whose designs resulted in the great globe of molten iron and the plates floating on it and the thin veneer of civilisation clustered in small, temporary camps on the plates. And that mind knows our impermanence and the pain of it. And that mind has shared in our impermanence and the pain of it and shares in it still.
Comments
There are no bad people being punished here. This isn't God hating Christchurch, or some sort of result of some supposed sin. It just *happened* because we live in a country that is still alive and moving and changing, and sometimes that creates death and destruction in amidst all the beauty.
But I just wish with all my heart it hadn't happened here and now. My heart goes out to the people of Christchurch, and there is no comfort anyone can find for them that can heal what they're going through, except the slow comfort of time.
Also such an event brings out the best in people, who stop their normal busy self-centered lives to care for strangers.
We share your great sadness at the loss of loved people and places in Christchurch.
We thought it was safe, as we thought the Press Building and the CTV building and the Grand Chancellor and..... were safe. Obviously it was not safe enough and apart from the relatives of those still in the Cathedral I doubt that anyone in the city is as shattered by that as is the Dean and his staff. The challenge will be to make the new Cathedral, whatever it might look like, as safe as say, the art gallery.