This is a sample of the wit and wisdom of the American journalist Charles Kuralt (1934 – 1997) who for many years headed a segment entitled On The Road on CBS Evening Television News about quirky aspects of his country: “Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.” (Anything but jam-packed lanes of flashing cars, trucks, pickups and Winnebagos on the wrong side of the road, that is.) Another timely Kuralt quote concerns earthquakes: “It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.”
I’ve told this story before. “You can’t cross here! You can’t cross!”
A couple of us were hiking from Hermannsburg to Palm Valley in Central Australia along the seasonal chain of waterholes that is the Finke River.
A score or more dusky children had appeared out of the bush on the other side, kilometres from Hermannsburg, and we started to cross over the sloppy sand to them.
With lots of shouting, laughing and waving of arms, they were trying to tell us that the sand was not safe. Quicksand. They wobbled it with their feet, like jelly, and pointed further upstream, a safer place.
Earth doesn’t usually quake, or wobble, or collapse under our puny weight.
Isn’t the earth firm, formed, complete? We develop metaphors of solidity, reliability, around images related to earth and rock.
We’re on “solid ground.” We’re “grounded”, “hard as a rock”. Anything that threatens the very foundations of life on earth must be big, “earth shattering.” Is this the mindset which makes it so hard for some of us to believe that what we do to the earth can even change its climate, its seasons, its solid ground?
Surely we don’t pack enough weight to interfere with all the old reliables: “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night” which, we were promised, “will never cease, as long as the earth endures.”
And then something happens that suddenly throws doubt on the certainty that “the earth endures”, or at the very least the continuation of our life on the earth, remains sure. Such earth shattering moments drag us kicking and screaming to confront our own mortality, and we are afraid as we have never been afraid before.
When the ancient Hebrews wanted to express that sometimes the bottom falls out of the most solid-seeming lives, and at those times people experience their own smallness, and their need of a more stable foundation, they spoke in terms reminiscent of earthquakes and tsunamis: “… we will not fear, though the earth give way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging… (Psalm 46).
They believed they heard their God promising them: “Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken, nor my covenant of peace will not be removed …” (Isaiah 54)
Their deity set their feet on a rock that was higher than the ones that earthquakes remove and tsunamis overwhelm. They harnessed the evocative language of earthquakes to bolster faith and its sometimes uncertain companion, hope.
What is an earthquake?”
A violent sudden shaking of the ground, typically destructive, a result of movements within earth’s crust or volcanic action.”
Singers Carole King and James Taylor used the same language about love: “I feel the earth move under my feet / I feel the sky tumblin’ down / tumblin’ down / tumblin’ down.”
Like destructive and constructive sides of the one coin, the mysterious powers tear down old certainties and offer us new possibilities.
It is one of those double-sided moments of terror that Charles Kuralt is referring to when he says “It takes an earthquake to remind us that we walk on the crust of an unfinished planet.”
Few “natural” events, no matter how terrifying, are unequivocally bad.
The volcano that belches lava down the mountainside and blasts fiery rocks on nearby villagers is laying down the earliest stages of the rich red soil that will feed a nation’s future inhabitants.
The earthquake which demonstrates that no matter how solid our created foundations appear to be, all things move, all things are still assuming their shape, their purpose, their end goal.
Every time an egg shatters, that most fragile and precious of objects, and a new fledging emerges, an unquestionably good destruction is gifted to the earth, though we may not understand that immediately.
It does us good to find the shattered beauty which the parent bird dropped on our grass to hide the location where the fledging crouches safe in the nest and to know that destruction is sometimes the path to new life.
We puny mortals walk on the crust of an unfinished planet, we who are ourselves “now, but not yet” beings, of whom the Biblical language says, “it is not yet clear what we shall become.”
We are not almighty, nor is the crust on which we walk, on which we sometimes mistakenly believe we can without retribution heap the vilest of indignities. Those who walk on an unfinished crust, must treat it as something that can and will break.
This is a truth of earthly living that is good to embrace. If the universal demons of pandemics can spread among us like wildfires, seemingly snuffing out lives at random, then we who walk the crust of an unfinished planet, or people the not yet complete story of the earth, are not the ones in charge.
The American novelist Susan Meissner’s latest book is ‘The Nature of Fragile Things’.
“It is the nature of the earth,” she says, “to shift. It is the nature of fragile things to break.”
But the blurb on her book, looking back on the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 declares, “Lives are lost, lives are shattered, but some rise from the ashes forever.”
This pandemic too, it seems, shall also pass.