Dear All,

As you will have seen, the devastation has mounted further. Veteran journalists have described this as nothing less than 'unprecedented'. The tragedy has been called 'Biblical'. The numbers have risen to horrifying proportions.

The world response to date has been fantastic. Despite sluggish first pledges, due to global activism and engagement, numerous countries and companies (hurrah!) have jumped in. The U.S. has just increased its aid amount from $35 million to $350 million. The company Pfizer itself matched the initial $35 million pledge. The Japanese just today have become the largest single donors with a pledge of $500 million. We have to keep this going and every little bit helps.

The Aussies at Sydney Harbour DID celebrate New Year, but ALSO put prayers into ACTION by collecting money during the celebration and gathered $750,000 for the relief efforts from the merry-makers! That's how life can respond to suffering, that's how celebrating what we have left can combine with compassion and support for those who have been hurt so badly.

The big danger now is that our global attention span is a notoriously fickle thing. There are highly visible events upcoming in January, not the least of which are Palestinian AND Iraqi elections. While we have a window of focus on this terrible tragedy in Southeast Asia, we have to continue to agitate AND to act -- to make our prayers and love VISIBLE through concerted action.

Please speak to everyone you can. Many of you out there are 'influentials' in your own companies, societies, even countries. While we have the world's attention, we have to get as much long-term support committed to as we possibly can. Every voice counts, every dollar or peso or rupee or dirham or dong, helps.

It may be important to stress in particular Sri Lanka, extremely hard hit and without the necessary infrastructure or resources that other countries have. And of course Indonesia, given the sheer scale of devastation in some of its poorest provinces. Let's get these stories circulating, let's let our leaders know our compassion and concern is there for the long haul. Let's make sure we ask for ACCOUNTABILITY too in terms of 'coming through' on aid pledges and commitments, and for the distribution of that aid to where it most needs to go. This last is as essential as any of it of course.

For both Indonesia and Sri Lanka, this is also an historic moment for potential peace-making, as hands and hearts are extended across historic grievances (I refer here to some of the hardest hit areas in these two countries being home to separatist movements) in a moment of human connection, healing and hope. We musn't let this pass! Those of you in these countries, you must DEMAND nothing less. It would be a true sacrilege, to let so much death and suffering not jolt our humanity awake. We have to let this shock help us to dedicate to not hurting each other any further due to half-baked ideologies and blinkered ethnic thinking. We have to move ON!

In India, there has been heartening evidence of this already. A local Mosque was shown playing host to ALL religions, becoming a site where relief agencies are focusing food, clothing, medicine and other help. There, people who saved each others lives have become bonded, transcending the separation between 'Hindu', 'Muslim', 'Sikh', 'Christian'. In their togetherness, we see REAL religion and spirituality. We see what Aldoux Huxley so wonderfully termed, 'The Perennial Philosophy', the one that we find replicated in all cultures and all times. It has always been about 'service', 'love', 'compassion'. The other bits, 'hatred', 'exclusion', are just human politics tainting something that, at its best, is really seeking to challenge us to rise above our laziness and fear.

Finally, if you're trying to make some spiritual sense of this pain and how we might channel our grief into both compassion and constructive action, please refer to the last newsletter we sent out, just last week. It is a reflection on tragedy and how we might attempt, however imperfectly, to ensure death doesn't have the last word. As I wrote after 9/11, our job as the living, is to somehow rescue love from destruction's debris.

Yours in community,

OK