Lament for Myanmar

This week, as perhaps you are, I’ve been feeling stunned about what’s going on in Myanmar, also known as Burma. Cyclone Nargis, with winds of up to 120 miles per hour, swept through the country last Saturday. The preliminary estimate of 25,000 dead could actually be closer to 100,000 people. The UN estimates that 1 million people could be left homeless. Last September, the world’s attention turned to the area when the government violently suppressed pro-democracy protests by Buddhist monks. Now, the government is only slowly permitting humanitarian aid to enter the country, but many aid workers are still unable to secure visas even as the disaster mounts.

Now, as with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as with the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean 2004, we simply cannot understand why things like this happen. We try to explain, of course. Both here and abroad, we can point to the inadequacy of human response, and political and environmental factors that caused the disaster in the first place. Human activity causes climate change, which in turn impacts water temperature, which in turn makes for more severe hurricanes. Political systems fail, self-interest clouds the judgment of those in charge, and leaders make bad choices. But none of our explanations suffice. At the bottom of those questions, we’re still trying to understand why God would create a world in which such things happen. They are “natural” disasters—but why are they natural?

The scale of global inequality, too, is mindboggling. We Americans are anticipating our “free” cash from the government, encouraged to buy things to spur on the consumer economy. In Burma, a representative from the American embassy has said that there are no nails in the capital city. How do you go about recovering from a natural disaster with no nails? When you have to ship in just a simple chainsaw from neighboring countries?

I don’t have any answers today—all any of us can do is pray, listen, learn, give what we can. I think there is something holy in offering witness to tragedy—certainly, try to improve the situation—but also simply open ourselves to the grief of others. Lament is as strong a Biblical tradition as repentance. Many of the psalms are psalms of lament, telling stories of pain and suffering of sackcloth and ashes. The psalmist writes in vivid imagery, “I have become like a vulture in the wilderness, like an owl among the ruins…I have eaten ashes for bread, and mingled my drink with weeping.” The book of Lamentations tells the story of the perceived rejection of Israel, but ends with hopeful lines of faith in God. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’

There is hope, but it’s an active hope—we are called to do what we can, and to trust that life can come from the ashes. We cannot know why these things happen. But we can know that God is never absent from those in pain. So today, I invite you to pray in hope. For Myanmar/Burma, and for us. For wise leaders and diplomatic solutions to crises all around the world. Let us pray for our own hearts, too, that we have the courage to be open to others’ pain and to give what we can to alleviate their suffering.

For more on the Anglican response to the disaster, visit http://www.er-d.org