Along with extensive, sometimes heroic, recovery efforts in the many neighborhoods devastated by the recent firestorms in Los Angeles county, conversations online and among concerned Californians are once again focusing on preparedness.
There are always things we can do to prepare ourselves for natural disasters–retrofit houses in earthquake-prone areas; keep flares, lanterns, water, and first-aid kits in accessible storage spaces; agree with family and friends who might be a contact hub; make sure the car is in good repair and has at least half a tank of gas; know which of your neighbors might need extra help and which neighbors are willing to be called upon for special expertise–tech people, plumbers, mechanics, food preparers, nurses.
We’ve even learned some things in the generations since World War II about preparing ourselves for unnatural disasters–bombings, mass shootings, cyberattacks. Arguably the fire in Los Angeles qualifies as an unnatural disaster; our abuse of natural systems, including overpopulating deserts and coastlands and depleting water tables, makes it harder to determine what “natural” actually means.
Unnatural disasters include forms of political and economic disruption that, sometimes with the stroke of a pen, subjugate or endanger whole groups of people, driving them underground or onto precarious boats or into refugee camps.
Witnessing these events, as we should, if only to stay in solidarity with the poor as faith calls us to do, we have to ask ourselves: How does one prepare for those kinds of tectonic shifts? How could ordinary people in Gaza possibly have prepared for hospitals and schools to be demolished and bombs to reduce their homes to rubble? Or families in Sudan? Or in Kharkiv? Some things we can’t prepare for.
Preparation, in any case, can give us only limited protection. Sometimes it can even backfire. I think of people I know whose houses are rigged with security devices in every room and how those very devices expose them to hacking or surveillance. There’s a point beyond preparedness where even the most prudent or anxious among us have to live in trust. That is the point at which, if we are adult and aware, we come to terms with the fact of our fundamental vulnerability.
As a Californian, watching familiar neighborhoods burn, familiar coastal mountains looming behind walls of smoke, familiar beaches grey-scaped and deserted, I mourn our collective losses: one disaster brings up another, and by instantaneous transmission we live with the mixed blessing of getting to–or having to–see images of them all in living color.
Whether that exposure makes us more compassionate or numbs us to the point of pathological indifference is a question Susan Sontag raised in her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others–a searching reflection on how we respond to photographic images of each other’s suffering. If we can see them, should we? What are the ethics of representation? What does it mean to keep a “respectful distance” from others’ suffering and grieving, and how is that to be balanced against the deep and right-hearted impulse to help?
Money helps, and food, and shelter and blankets and counseling. Most of us who are not “first responders” can follow them with those forms of immediate assistance. Fewer of us are called directly to deal with the immense systems we inhabit–water distribution, flood control, firefighting, highway design, emergency medical services, law enforcement, collection and allocation of public funds.
People of faith are also called to view the course of human events not only in practical and political terms but in terms of what our sacred texts and our life of prayer teach: we are in God’s hands. We are ultimately utterly safe and beloved. We are here on a journey that includes very dark valleys indeed. At the end of that journey is the homeland we return to when we leave these vulnerable bodies and psyches and are welcomed by a whole communion of saints and angels into an energy field prophets and poets have sought ways to help us imagine.
As disruptive events have led me to think about preparedness this week, I’ve been recalling and pondering something I found myself saying to many goal-oriented undergraduates over the years: You may know what you’re preparing for, but you never know what you’re being prepared for. It’s good to choose a major, set goals and intentions, and prepare ourselves to carry them out with skill and grace.
It’s good to stay on the learning curve. But I can’t think of a single adult I know who hasn’t landed in a life situation that wasn’t at all what they thought they were preparing for: working in a job or following a vocation that has nothing to do with what they were originally trained for; raising a disabled child; navigating a second marriage and stepparenting; going bankrupt and recovering; rebuilding life after a catastrophic flood or fire.
In retrospect, with eyes informed by faith, we can often see how, in fact, we were prepared for what befell us. When life in its mysterious way delivers the unexpected, we may find reservoirs of wisdom, resilience, agility, trust, hope, faith, humor, or the generosity that moves us from our own suffering into solidarity with others’. Habits of prayer or meditation or exercise or quick learning suddenly come to matter in new ways.
How often has any of us heard someone, bemused, say aloud, “I didn’t know I had it in me.” I didn’t know I’d have the resources to rise to this. I didn’t know I’d be the one to organize an emergency response team for the neighborhood. I would never have guessed I’d have it in me to cope with chronic pain. I’d never have imagined I’d find myself working with the sick and dying. Or tutoring kids with learning challenges. Or managing a small farm. Or starting a nonprofit. Somehow, those people found themselves prepared both in their willingness or openness to the call of the moment, and in skills adjacent to the ones they had worked to acquire.
My favorite lines in T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” are these:
And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.
By the time we’re adults, we may have a good idea of where our gifts or strengths lie. We may find our way into appropriate vocations that sustain our bodies and spirits for decades. Even so, what we “came for” is likely more mysterious and likely to unfold in unexpected ways, perhaps late in life. We don’t know even now, I suspect, what deep purposes we’re serving, or whose. What we put into the world is only partly conscious. Apart from what we choose to do, we may be serving important ends by what we embody or radiate or witness or endure. It’s not altogether up to us.
The disciples couldn’t have the remotest idea what they were being prepared for. Nor could the celebrity actor who found himself clearing cars from narrow, smoke-filled roads for fire crews. Nor could the couple who found themselves to with an extra room and just enough resources to house a refugee. We’re facing a shifting, turbulent, political and ecological landscape in the months to come. I have no doubt it will call us into new places. We don’t know–any of us–what will be required of us, but we know that “bidden or unbidden, God is present.” And knowingly or unknowingly, we’re being prepared.
