Grieve Passionately for Haiti

The sting of the storm was in the tail and the tail hit Haiti, in a seemingly random way, as the tail of a cat might do in passing a table crowded with objects. While we ache with the pain which Americans are enduring, just as their thoughts were beginning to turn from Halloween to the two big festive highlights of the year, Thanksgiving and Christmas, we are stung by the seeming injustice of a second environmental catastrophe to hit Haiti within three years. We feel the sting of this storm as it devastates, once again, the lives of some of the world's poorest. According to Saturday's Guardian newspaper, 350,000 people are still living in tents, flimsy structures at best and, in the face of such a storm, little better than paper. We too feel powerless , outraged by the seeming injustice of it all and frustrated in our giving.

Giving money does not necessarily connect with hearts. It does not bind us to those human beings in the way of ordinary human contact, of the things we take for granted, like a smile or a touch. We need to find a way of grieving which binds us to the people of Haiti. We need to grieve with them, feel with them and not just for them, touch them from within our hearts. Then our outrage becomes a response to their suffering in the wider economy of the human need for love, as we direct our anger back to love's source. Then whatever we feel, and subsequently give or do, towards alleviating their suffering becomes an act of solidarity, a real and necessary resistance to the fury and injustice of this storm, to which our unthinking use of carbon-generating fuels has in part contributed. Now perhaps we shall begin, before it is too late, to sense our shared humanity, in what the people of Haiti are enduring.

I am writing from a place which is no more than very wet but, for once, I am glad of this unrelenting rain because in a small way, it keeps my inner fire alive. The weather here is only a very faint echo of what climate change is doing to the people of Haiti, but it is enough to make me love them more as my own kin and, in doing so, to protest mightily to the One who holds all human beings in his embrace.

 Our grieving finds its source in his love, in his righteousness. God's righteousness embodies mercy and justice. It is a furious love, like the fury of the hurricane, only life-giving. So it is good to be angry because our outrage is a passionate grieving, answering his passionate love for all people caught up in such disasters. It is good to own the outrage, as well as a little of the fear, like the fear experienced by a first time mother who, as she gave birth, had the tent she was lying in ripped away from her, along with her few possessions. We must yearn and grieve and love with her, and with all the dispossessed of Haiti, and let our grief be passionate because grieving passionately for the suffering of others, for righteousness sake, is the beginning of a new future for all of us.