Can't snap out of it...

I picked up my Gospels tonight and I read about all the miracles of Jesus. And I want to say: what about us? Why do You allow kids to be crushed by buildings? Are our kids any less worthy to You than the ones you met two thousands years ago? We need miracles too, not so much so we can believe more, but maybe to know that You care, to know that You'll step in for us, that You're on our side, that You'll carry our kids like young lambs in Your arms.

On the back of my mind, a song which I used to love. "He's got the whole world in his hands". Now it just hurts. What kind of Love is that that lets kids be crushed by buildings? Do You ever step in? Do You ever say: "No, I don't want five-year-olds to agonise for days"?

Oh unhappy mortals! Oh wretched earth!

Oh dreadful gathering of so many dead!

The eternal sport of fruitless griefs!

Mistaken philosophers who cry: "All is well",

Approach, look upon these frightful ruins,

This debris, these shreds, these unhappy ashes,

These scattered limbs beneath these broken marbles;

A hundred thousand wretches swallowed by the earth,

Bleeding, torn, with hearts still beating,

Buried beneath their roofs, ended without help

Their lamentable days in the horrors of their suffering!

Are you going to say in the face of the semi-formed cries

Of their expiring voices, in the face of the spectacle

Of their smouldering remains: "It is the effect of necessary laws

That require this choice of a God that is free and good"?

Will you say, on seeing this pile of victims:

"God is avenged, their death is the price of their crimes"?

What crime, what fault have these children committed

Broken and bleeding on their mother's breast?

It is pride, you say, seditious pride

Which pretends that in our fallen state we can be better.

Go, interrogate the banks of the Tagus,

Dig in the debris of this bloody ravage;

Ask the dying, in this moment of terror,

If it is pride that cries: "Oh heaven, help me!

Oh heaven, have pity on poor humanity!"

"All is well, you say, and all is necessary."

What! The whole universe, without this hellish gulf,

Without a Lisbon swallowed up, would have been even worse?

I respect God, but I love the universe.

When man dares complain of a scourge so dreadful,

It is not pride that speaks, alas, but his very soul.

Will the sad dwellers on these desolated reaches,

In the horror of their sufferings, will they be consoled

If someone said to them: "Fall, die quietly;

For the happiness of the world your refuges have been destroyed;

Other hands will build your burnt out palaces,

Other people will be born within your shattered walls;

The North will enrich itself from your fated losses;

All your misfortunes are a good within the general law;

God will see you with the same eye as he sees the vile worms

Of which you will be the prey in the depths of your tombs"?

What dreadful language to address the unfortunate!

Cruel! Do not now add outrage to all my grief.

No, do not present again to my agitated heart

Those immutable laws of necessity,

That chain of bodies, spirits and worlds.

Oh dreams of savants! Oh chimerical profundities!

God holds the chain in his hand; he is not enchained;

Everything is determined by his beneficent choice:

He is free, he is just, he is not implacable.

Why then do we suffer under a righteous master?

Here is the fatal knot that has to be untied.

But how can one conceive a God, goodness itself,

Who lavishes blessings on the children he loves,

And yet pours wrongs upon them by the handful?

What eye can penetrate his deep designs?

From a Being all perfect, evil cannot be born;

It cannot come from anyone else, for God alone is master.

Yet it exists. O sad truth!

Oh astonishing mixture of contrarieties!

A God comes to console our afflicted race;

He visits earth and nothing has changed!

An arrogant sophist tells us that he cannot do it;

"He could do it, says another, and just didn't want to:

He did want to, without doubt"; and, while they argue,

Subterranean lightening swallows Lisbon,

And scatters the debris of thirty cities

From the bloody shores of the Tagus to the sea of Cadiz.

Either man is born guilty, and God is punishing his race,

Or this absolute master of being and space,

Without rage, without pity, quietly, indifferently,

Tracks the endless stream of his first decrees;

Or unformed matter, rebellious to its master,

Carries in itself faults as necessary as itself;

Or perhaps God tests us, and this mortal stay

Is no more than a narrow passage to an eternal world.

We suffer here but passing sorrows;

Death is a blessing that finishes all our misery.

But when we emerge from this dreadful passage,

Which of us will pretend to deserve to be happy?

Whatever position one takes, one must suffer, without doubt.

There is nothing that one can know, and nothing that one can dread.

Nature is mute, one questions her in vain;

There is need of a God who speaks to human kind.

It pertains to him alone to explain his works,

To console the weak and elucidate the wise.

Man, in doubt, in error, abandoned without him

Seeks in vain the reeds that might support him.

Leibniz teaches me not at all by what invisible knots,

In the best ordered of possible universes,

An eternal disorder, a chaos of misfortunes,

Mingles with our empty pleasures such real distress,

Nor why the innocent, the same as the guilty,

Suffer equally inevitable pain.

I can no longer conceive how everything is well:

I am like a doctor; alas! I know nothing.

What then can the widest stretch of spirit do?

Nothing: the book of fate is closed to our sight.

Man, a stranger to himself, is unknown to man.

What am I, where am I, where am I going, from where do I come?

Tormented atoms on a mound of mud,

Which death swallows, and with which destiny plays,

But thinking atoms, atoms whose eyes,

Guided by thought, have measured the skies;

To the heart of the infinite we hurl our being,

Without being able for a moment to see ourselves or know ourselves.

This world, this theatre of pride and error,

Is full of unfortunates who speak of happiness.

Everyone complains, everyone groans in search for well being:

No-one wants to die, no-one wants to be reborn.

Sometimes, in our days dedicated to grief,

We staunch our tears with the hand of pleasure;

But the pleasure flees, and passes like a shadow;

Our disappointments, our regrets, our losses, are without number.

The past is for us nothing but a sad memory;

The present is terrible if there is no future,

If the night of the tomb destroys the being that thinks.

One day all will be well, here is our hope;

Everything is fine today, here is the illusion.

The wise are mistaken, and only God is right.

Humble in my sighing, submissive in my suffering,

I do not raise myself against Providence.

In a tone less lugubrious one saw me in former times

Sing the seductive laws of sweet pleasures:

Other times, other fashions taught by old age,

Sharing the weakness of straying humans,

Searching to illuminate myself in a thick night,

I only know how to suffer, and not complain.
Once a caliph, in his last hour,

Uttered as his only prayer to the God he adored:

"I bring you, Oh sole King, sole unlimited Being,

All that you do not have in your immensity,

Faults, regrets, ills and ignorance.

"But he might have added further -- hope.

Votaire, A Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, translation from this website.