Sunday August 22, 2021
Dear God,
Why do you keep picking on Haiti?
It is, by far, the poorest country in the Americas. It has the fewest resources to recover from a disaster. It has no industries, no exports, no assets, and no hope.
Perhaps that’s overstating the situation, but only slightly. Of all the countries that could be afflicted by an earthquake, Haiti is probably the country least capable of surviving.
But you hit it with a 7.0 earthquake in 2010, which resulted in at least 20,000 deaths and left millions homeless. It’s not possible to discuss property damage, because most of the property that fell down was already falling down anyway.
Now, while it’s still recovering from the 2010 earthquake – if it ever will – you whack it with a bigger 7.2 earthquake on Saturday August 14. Bringing down a whole lot more buildings. Slabs of concrete tilted against earth other. Rebar twisted like pretzels. Crushed cars. Entire buildings tilted farther than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
And if that’s not enough, over 100 more earthquakes during the next two days.
What did Haiti do to deserve this treatment?
Obviously, I’m assuming that you deliberately cause earthquakes and storms and tsunamis. I’m not challenging your right to intervene. If you’re almighty, that’s your prerogative. You don’t need to explain your reasons to mere mortals.
But I do question your timing. Don’t you think that hitting Haiti with an earthquake right after its president was assassinated by foreign mercenaries was a bit much? And then to follow it a week later with Tropical Storm Grace?
If I’m wrong, if you didn’t cause any of this, just hit the delete button.
Classic underdog
Otherwise, I’d have expected you to be on Haiti’s side. Jesus always took the side of the underdog. There’s not one reference in the gospels to him favouring the rich and powerful.
If any nation qualifies as “underdog,” it would be Haiti.
Haiti was once the jewel in the French crown, the richest of its colonies. They called it “The Pearl of the Antilles.” But it was wealthy – for France – because of millions of slaves imported from Africa.
France was not a benign authority. Its slaves were so brutally treated that they rebelled, under the leadership of a man named Toussaint Louverture.
The French were, at the time, consolidating their hold on the Louisiana Territory, which they had just acquired from Spain in a secret deal. In those days, Louisiana extended all the way from the Mississippi to the Rockies.
When the Haitian slaves revolted, Napoleon Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law to quell them. Charles LeClerc took an armada and an army. And instructions to “destroy all of the black people in the mountains – men and women – and spare only children under twelve years of age. We must not… leave a single person of colour in the colony…”
That time, you would seem to be on the slaves’ side, God. Because they won. With his forces in disarray, Napoleon couldn’t protect Louisiana. So he sold it to the expanding United States of America, for a bargain-basement price of $26 million.
If it hadn’t been for Haiti, the western half of the continent would be French-speaking today.
Should I assume you prefer to speak English, God?
Brownie points
Haiti declared its independence in 1804. Its new constitution abolished slavery, with no exceptions. Most histories consider Haiti the first nation anywhere to abolish slavery: 30 years before William Wilberforce in Britain, 61 years before Abe Lincoln and the 13th Amendment freed slaves in the Divided States.
That should have earned Haiti some brownie points, shouldn’t it?
Jesus never defended slavery. His travelling sales rep, Paul, clearly rejected it: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” he wrote.
So how come you allowed France to demand reparations for losing its most lucrative colony that impoverished Haiti for 120 years.
Haiti didn’t pay off its debt to French (and American) banks until 1947. Is that what ticked you off, God? Are you a fiscal conservative?
No doubt Pat Robertson, or someone like him, will blame Haiti’s misfortunes on mixing African Vodou with Roman Catholicism.
Robertson blamed the 2010 earthquake on Haiti’s “pact with the devil.” According to legend, Haiti’s liberators launched their revolution with a Vodou ceremony called Bwa Kayiman, which begged “Satan” – in Christian terminology -- to help overthrow their French masters.
God, do you let guys like Pat Robertson set your agenda?
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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn
The first letter about last week’s column, on aging and losses, came from friend and neighbour Elaine Gibbons: “Just read your column on how conversations with family and friends seem to turn to medical issues. We have three other couples, friends for 50-plus years, from before we were all married. Amazingly, we are all with our original spouses!
“We have tried over many years to have a monthly dinner together. As the years have crept by the conversations innocently started to become more and more about our various medical issues. So, at some point, the rule was made that each of us have 5 minutes in which to give our latest health updates, then it is on to more lively discussions about life in general. So far so good!”
Tom Watson: “Last year, I lost four close friends. Each, in their own way, left this world a little better for having been here. We know that our time on this Earth is limited; what more can we hope for than to do as they, and your friend David, did?”
Lesley Clare: “I vividly remember my Grandmother telling me that she dreaded Christmas cards. They were filled with news of friends who had died.”
Isabel Gibson sent a personal note: “I'm sorry for your loss -- and for this age-&-stage of loss. As a friend of my mother's said at the umpteenth funeral they had both attended within a few months, ‘They're mowing our row.’
“I don't know how some people manage to enjoy even the late stages of the road in the midst of all the loss -- of both the friends and the physical vigour -- but they should bottle that capacity and sell it.”
Steve Roney: “It seems to me your metaphor of life as a marathon does not work. If life is a marathon, surely the finish line is death. And yet you show the dead as dropping out of the race. Leaving no end point, and no goal; thus no race.
“If life is a marathon, those like David Scott who have died have reached the finish line ahead of us.”
“Not a sad picture.”
Bob Rollwagen wrote about accepting the inevitable: “Three stages of life -- Hatched, Matched, and Dispatched. It seems when the Obit is written, we are all wonderful and the world will miss us. I must admit that I often think of several friends who have died and had memorable parts of my life. But most days are full of current events and current friends and colleagues that are part of the journey that will end sometime in the future, for some reason not known at this moment. I’m glad to have been here and glad to have impacted a few people in a positive way -- or so they have told me. Some will remember; most may not even know I left.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns