NEVER SEND TO KNOW FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS...

Dear everyone,

Please do share this as widely as you wish.

I was going to send out a seasonal 'love letter to the world'. We're holding off on that until Janaury 10th, largely out of respect for the terrible natural disaster we've all seen unfolding in Southeast Asia.

The line above continues to be haunting in its simplicity, directness and aptness. A part of any feeling human being over this time has to be with those 'making their way' through this horror.

A part of me is with the person out for a morning swim, suddenly swept away forever. A part of me, however imperfect and inadequate a part, is with the mother physically separated forever from her child (having come to the very destination that has so robbed her to celebrate togetherness). A part of me grieves with the 7 year old whose parents still haven't been found, but whose hand is held tenderly by a Thai woman, ensuring he's not alone. A part of me is numbed by the devastation of homes and everything built up over a life-time, now reclaimed by the ocean...ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

A part of me rallies with those wonderful families in Sri Lanka and India, bringing plastic receptacles of food, clothing and blankets to share around. A part of me is redeemed by that community, by that connection. A part of us similarly has to respond, in our own small ways, as governments and donors already have, with unstinting generosity. A part of me hopes for a small fraction of the courage and resolve of the countless relief workers who are arriving wherever they are needed, acting as a bridge between despair and at least a vestige of dignity and hope.

In roughly 24 hours, the human impact of 7 9/11's in terms of human suffering have taken place. And while nobody can be blamed here (unlike 9/11), the devastation is no easier to take, the grief is almost as inconsolable.

Like 9/11, the coming together of people to support and help each other is the heart-warming 'silver lining'. Crisis creates community, we saw that at Ground Zero, we're seeing it in villages and hamlets and coastal towns across numerous countries today. One day we'll realise perhaps, that a crisis shouldn't have to hit us in the head, or so directly and personally in the heart, to be registered. Our human family IS in crisis, on so many fronts. Maybe we can't 'yet' predict physical tsunamis, but what about the political, financial, ecological and emotional ones we are allowing to build up and gather in force?

Two considerations here. First, who knows if we shifted our priorities away from the endless 'innovations' relative to weapons of mass destruction, nuclear proliferation, and the untiring encouragement of the 'defence' industry, we might actually create technologies which would allow us to far better deal with such seismic shocks and natural disasters? A vain hope? Maybe, but let's try it, before we give up on it. Innovation tends to flow where money goes. How great a priority are we treating this as, compared to military initiatives underway? If 9/11 catapulted us towards global vigilance against terrorism, how many such natural disasters need to shock us before we take similar aim at seeing what we can develop by means of prediction, preparation and warning systems?

Second, even if we can do nothing regarding the above, given the scale of these perhaps unavoidable horrors shouldn't we be inspired to bring greater imagination and zeal to bear on the more 'avoidable' ones? When we look at the wreckage of Madrid, Beslan, Darfur, Baghdad, Mosul, and more, will it shift our priorities at all? There is the transformational Buddhist insight that we are not transformed by our experience but by our capacity to experience. Amen. It's high time as a human family we let such tragedies increase that 'capacity'.

Perhaps that capacity needs to be stirred and our tribute to the slain from the earthquake in Iran last year, the devastation in Florida earlier this year, and now this earthquake, needs to be to get better at grappling with issues that are more within our proactive domain. Maybe, as the Ukrainian just demonstrated when they were treated to a fait accompli that just wasn't good enough, it's time for us to agitate and express our powers of citizenship and demand accountability before the tribunal of conscience that should define our humanity.

My wife Leslie and I have been close to a few hot spots in our time. I've been in Tokyo for a point 8 on the richter scale earthquake. We were in L.A. both for a major earthquake and the Rodney King riots. We were in Colombo Sri Lanka, just across the street when the Central Bank bomb went off some years back and later saw our hotel lobby transformed into a make-shift medical centre. We passed through affected areas during the SARS scare (we called it our 'SARS sweep' -- Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada...). But by and large, it's been pretty tame compared to all this. But it's been enough to remind us that life is fragile, and we have to live and love every moment we can.

While we grieve along with all those who have lost their loved ones, for those of us with our loved ones intact, let's use this time and season to come together with them, to truly rejoice in our relationships. Many years back when I lost someone I dearly loved, I wrote a thought for her funeral: 'She had learned to love and she knew she was loved in turn. She had found the only true joy our precarious existence allows. Love on.'

Thornton Wilder said: 'There is a land of the living and a land of the dead. The only bridge is love. The only hope, the only meaning.' As the New Year beckons, for those of us alive, and together with at least some of those we love, let's walk across that bridge. Let's heal some hurts, let's put aside some of our feigned indifference, let's let what brought us together revitalise who we are today.

Maybe in addition, let's see if we can help someone. Perhaps a donation, perhaps a helping hand. Perhaps some support to someone hurting and alone. Perhaps a chance to pay homage to those devastated by responding to the impossible question 'why' (there is obviously no 'answer'), by LIVING an affirmation of caring and concern.

During the terrible atrocities suffered by the Jews during WWII, a collection of rabbis and believers went through the ritual of putting God on trial for their suffering. They found God 'guilty', they could find no meaning to this. They said, 'God is dead. Now, it's time for the evening prayers.' That's the faith we need to call upon...to try and do better for each other than we have to date in terms of our global priorities and commitments.

Herman Wouk's monumental WAR AND REMEMBRANCE has a scene where in Auschwitz, during a sermon, one of the main characters seeks to interpret the book of Job. He suggests that when Job at the height of his totally unearned suffering can say, 'God is good, glory be to God', that is the defeat of that very suffering. As they went into the gas chambers, many made Job's choice, and cried out not only in pain, but to the glory of God. That spirit was the real defeat of Nazism, and all similar barbarisms before and since.

If you and I can engage in life in the midst of the cruelest suffering; if we can know that life is good and that if it matters to even one person how we live then it's worth living as meaningfully and as productively as we can, then the human story will continue, and will be worth continuing.

Let's not let these deaths pass without letting them breathe new life into our own gratitude for all we have left and a desire to share that awareness in joy with everyone we can. Let's hold hands together and thereby light up the darkness and warm up the coldest corners of our world. And let's allow our compassion for our fellow travelers on this life journey to be expressed as palpably as possible too. As we hear that distant (or not so distant) bell tolling, that's our greatest human opportunity.

Glory be to life, for all its tragic madness, life is good! And it really does matter whether love or hatred, community or exclusion, wisdom or ignorance, win.

Yours in deep grief and abounding gratitude,

OK

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