So many disasters.

Hurricanes, of course:  Helene and Milton and so many before, so many that will follow.  So much destruction, following wind and flood and storm surge.  Somehow the path of this most recent hurricane —  in how quickly it built up to raging destruction, in the difficulty of predicting the path and the outcomes, in the long aftermath of rebuilding that will be required — seems to to epitomize all kinds of disasters:

There are disasters of war: the anniversary commemoration of the Hamas attack on October 7, and the beginning of the second year of the destruction of Gaza with tens of thousands of innocents killed, even as new military actions open in Lebanon.  We’re nearly four years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Conflicts continue to rage in Sudan and so many other places.

On Indigenous Peoples Day we remember the shameful history of European colonialism and imperialism in the Americas and the result of centuries of genocide, enslavement, disease, and broken promises.

This month, especially, we are mired in the slow-motion disaster of our nation’s politics: misinformation, division, and contempt threaten our country’s future, and many of us fear what next month’s election might bring.

We struggle with personal disasters of cancer diagnoses, health complications, job loss, pressures at work and at school, relationship stress.  

All of us have come through the storm’s eye of grief and loss and fear, at one time or another.  Life-disrupting as these disasters are, we do not come through them alone: God comes through with us. Love comes through with us.  So in our common humanity and in faith, let us live in the spirit of these words of Steve Garnaas-Holmes:

Let yourself be stitched, then,
with all the others, in life’s fabric.
The whole wounded world needs your love,
the torn fabric needs the thread of your grace.
That is why you are here.
Amidst the mourning, the picking up of pieces,
the starting again,
keep loving.
In the end, it is all that survives disaster,
and all that redeems it.