Sometimes It's NOT Enough

Saw a note on FB that simply said that in these types of situations

Your Prayers are not enough.

It was referring, of course, to the Standard Response (TM) to mass shootings and other things that cause people incredible distress.

I am praying for you.

Now, not to be one who denigrates prayer since I believe it is an important spiritual action we all need, I understand what the first statement means.

• Prayers are not enough
• If that is all you plan to do!

Too often we all use that as a way to cope with our sense of powerlessness in the face of overwhelming problems, issues, disasters, and the like. We feel so damn powerless- and we don't like it! So we pray.

In and of itself, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, it may be the best thing we can do first.

But what then?

Sure, there are times when there is nothing else to do. But I have the feeling that we often stop right there with the prayer and move on. We have done our "duty" and prayed.

I feel better about myself. I am a good person. I have turned to God. I no longer feel powerless- or guilty for not being in the midst of all that. I go about my business.

Again, in and of itself, that is okay.

But what else can I do?

There may be more than I think.

But if I stop at the praying, I may never know what it is the God I am praying to WANTS me to do.

The Twelve-Step programs are clear there is more to prayer than praying. Step 11:

• Sought through prayer and meditation 
• to improve our conscious contact with God, 
• praying only for 
• the knowledge of God's will for us and 
• the power to carry it out.

 Prayer is often NOT all there is for me to do.

Thank God!

Worst-Case Scenarios

I was walking through the local Barnes and Noble the other evening and a book title caught my eye.

X-Events: The Collapse of Everything by John L. Casti

This, of course, was right after watching the news when people in the DC-area were complaining about their electric company not being able to get the electricity back on after the super derecho storm swept across hundreds of miles a week ago. Which of course was followed by the latest disaster of record-setting heat over more than half the nation which was followed by the devastation in the west where wildfires turn into record-setting firestorms. Locally this comes after rain in Duluth and Cannon Falls tore streets to shreds and spread water everywhere.

Oh, and did I mention the headline that if you want to see what global warming will look like, just take a look at the United States this summer.

So the title grabbed me.

Casti is no fly-by-night disaster maven. He is a complexity scientist and systems theorist. He worked for many years at the Santa Fe Institute and the RAND Corporation, and has also served on the faculties of Princeton University, the University of Arizona, and New York University.

Barnes and Noble says that Casti concludes that

[t]he intricate, over-complex systems on which we depend are increasingly vulnerable to sudden, complete collapse, catapulting us back into pre-industrial chaos. After a catastrophic "X-Event," he notes, almost everything is at stake: communication, transportation, food, water, medicine, electricity, and finance. A wake-up call to an overnight apocalypse that could hit us all too soon.

What might some of these be? Well in addition to running out of oil or a nuclear war there are these:

• Long-term widespread failure of the Internet
• Breakdown of the global food-supply system
• A continent-wide electromagnetic pulse destroys all electronics
• A global pandemic
• Failure of the electric power grid and clean water supply
• World financial collapse

Fun reading, huh?

But as a veteran reader of what is often called science fiction, or futurist fiction of what they refer to as "dystopian" visions, none of this really comes as a surprise to me. For as long as there has been science fiction, there has been this tendency to extrapolate into a dark and dismal future when all our technology disappears.

Interestingly Casti doesn't appear to be a hopeless doomsayer. He seems to say that it is possible to be prepared so the worst doesn't turn into an even darker worst. No we can't predict which problem will finally attempt to do us in, but we can keep from sticking our heads into the sand and ignore the possibilities.

Memories Return

The headline on Christian Science Monitor today said it quite clearly:

Japan nuclear crisis eclipses Three Mile Island, nears 'Chernobyl league'

March 28, 1979; 4:00 am.

I was fast asleep within 15 miles of Three Mile Island. I knew its steam plume well. Little did I know that a stuck valve was about to become one of the scariest weekends in my life, rivaling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

As events have been tragically unfolding in Japan this past weekend I had eerie echoes of TMI. That hydrogen gas that exploded in Japan's reactors sounded a lot like the "hydrogen bubble" in the middle of the Susquehanna River near Harrisburg. At the time we knew it was serious. Looking back today it becomes clear how serious it could have become.

Fortunately in Pennsylvania, the worst never happened. We are still not sure what that would be in Japan today. We do know Chernobyl, however, and that makes it even scarier. Experts here are saying it couldn't happen here. But neither could Three Mile Island. And neither could the ones in Japan.

A Curious Sidelight: Wikipedia has the following bit from the TMI incident.

The accident at the plant occurred 12 days after the release of the movie The China Syndrome, which featured Jane Fonda as a news anchor at a California television station. In the film, a major nuclear plant failure almost happens while Fonda's character and her cameraman (Michael Douglas) are at a plant producing a series on nuclear power. She proceeds to raise awareness of how unsafe the plant is. Coincidentally, there is a scene in which Fonda's character speaks with a nuclear safety expert, who says that a meltdown could render an area "the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable."

The movie was showing in a local theater and I am told those in the audience that weekend let out a strangled gasp as they thought of the reactor just up river- in Pennsylvania with them.

Beyond Belief

The power of the earth was shown again in yesterday's earthquake/tsunami in Japan. I watched the videos with a sense of incredible disbelief. How quickly life changes in times like that.

I know none of this is a surprise or particularly profound. But I was struck by one of the headline questions on an article:

Could the Quake Have Been Predicted?

We humans naturally hate unpredictability. If we can only dig deep enough, think the right way, find enough information, nothing should be beyond our ability to predict. There must have been, we believe, enough warning signs that this was going to happen that we could have predicted it if we had enough information and knew where to look.

Oh, if that were only true. When in reality it is far more chaotic and uncertain than that. It is far beyond our puny human ability to understand all the many forces at work that may have started miles away from the Japanese coast. Like the proverbial butterfly wing flapping in China causing a tornado in Minnesota, these forces of nature are so enormous and so fragile in their own geologic way, we will be lucky if we ever get good enough to predict an earthquake before it slides.

Sure, I know that I could be wrong. People have made statements like that about many things and been shown to be in error within days or years. But there is so much we don't understand; so much that is far beyond the vision that we have. We may get closer, but the BIG ONES will always elude us.

That is the price we pay for being human. We are powerless and in the end much of our lives are unmanageable. When we come to accept that, we have begun to find the source of serenity and grace.

No Words Are Possible

Haiti.

The pictures on TV show only a small, small view of the immensity of the tragedy and the fragility of our lives. No pact with any devil can bring about that kind of natural disaster. No pact with God can protect from the possibilities. Only trusting in God can bring people through with any amount of hope.

But I am not there- and it is not my family, my friends, my house, or city, or country lying amidst such devastation. All I can do is cry for those who are unable to do so for themselves.

In your mercy, O Lord, grant them your peace.