Katrina Reflections #5 (Bittersweet)
Labor Day weekend was gorgeous, three days of comfortable sun, cotton-ball clouds, and blue sky. I couldn’t imagine a better day, one that wasn’t too hot or cold, one that wasn’t too dry or wet. The sunsets were spectacular, the remains of the dying day spilling molten gold across the grass.
The beauty only made New Orleans look even worse, almost horrific, brutal, savage. How can such beauty coexist alongside such tragedy?
Somewhere a baby is born; elsewhere, one dies. Here someone regains his health after a terrible bout with cancer; elsewhere a woman struggles for breath from pneumonia, then stops. A priceless work of art is painted; another burns in a fire.
One nation grapples with poverty and civil unrest; another lives in the lap of luxury, sipping cappuccinos and watching the latest cinematic release on their home theaters, complaining about the inconvenience of the trailer inserts.
How does one reconcile such juxtaposition of beauty and death? The world is bipolar; nature is a passive-aggressive momentarily on the rampage before once again it curls comfortably by the fire and begins to purr.
The world seems so pitiless sometimes – not just the bully that tramples us into the dirt and steals our lunch money but then turns right around and buys a meal for the poor kid on the street. We are left only with WTH gaping jaw s and the sinking feeling that we can never be sure whether today we will be the victim of blind fury or the recipient of unimagined beauty.
And what of God? If nature is an extension of him, what does this say? Or is it merely a creation that has, for the moment, simply lost its mind?
The dichotomy is hard to reconcile, almost makes me want to weep. Knowledge of the bad almost makes it hard to enjoy the good, yet somehow I am supposed to. And I would not demand that someone else be miserable simply because I am suffering some tragedy. Somehow the human spirit, what it means to be created in God’s image, is supposed to harbor both realities in its heart at once -- a life informed both by pleasure and pain, beauty and revulsion, peace and strife.
The beauty only made New Orleans look even worse, almost horrific, brutal, savage. How can such beauty coexist alongside such tragedy?
Somewhere a baby is born; elsewhere, one dies. Here someone regains his health after a terrible bout with cancer; elsewhere a woman struggles for breath from pneumonia, then stops. A priceless work of art is painted; another burns in a fire.
One nation grapples with poverty and civil unrest; another lives in the lap of luxury, sipping cappuccinos and watching the latest cinematic release on their home theaters, complaining about the inconvenience of the trailer inserts.
How does one reconcile such juxtaposition of beauty and death? The world is bipolar; nature is a passive-aggressive momentarily on the rampage before once again it curls comfortably by the fire and begins to purr.
The world seems so pitiless sometimes – not just the bully that tramples us into the dirt and steals our lunch money but then turns right around and buys a meal for the poor kid on the street. We are left only with WTH gaping jaw s and the sinking feeling that we can never be sure whether today we will be the victim of blind fury or the recipient of unimagined beauty.
And what of God? If nature is an extension of him, what does this say? Or is it merely a creation that has, for the moment, simply lost its mind?
The dichotomy is hard to reconcile, almost makes me want to weep. Knowledge of the bad almost makes it hard to enjoy the good, yet somehow I am supposed to. And I would not demand that someone else be miserable simply because I am suffering some tragedy. Somehow the human spirit, what it means to be created in God’s image, is supposed to harbor both realities in its heart at once -- a life informed both by pleasure and pain, beauty and revulsion, peace and strife.
posted by Fortunato at 9:21 AM
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