Sunday Morning In Haiti

It's the earthquake plus two weeks. This morning Haitians across their country will face a different Sunday than last week, at least in their hearts and minds. Where a week ago there was shock, adrenalin, panic and the frantic search for loved ones, today there is reflection, deep pain, the sense of permanent loss. The emotion will have worn off and now the questions and despondency set in.In any disaster, people work overtime at its inception. Faced with a calamity too vast too comprehend, there is nevertheless the great urge to act, and in that great preoccupation comes a sense of purpose. Give it some time though, when the action has either succeeded or failed, and the purpose of it all is quietly, sometimes secretly, questioned.The Haitians are a deeply religious people, mostly Roman Catholic with a growing Protestant movement, but also a fair share of Voodooism. Today is their day of reckoning, when the panic has subsided and the deeper questions of life, and death, prevail. It will be the first of many such Sundays, but it will be the beginning of questioning and the hunger for answers. Every single large church in Port-au-Prince has been levelled, as have the major government offices and the UN building itself. Ironically, totally unharmed by the quake is the famed statue, "Le Maron Inconnu" - the "Unknown Escaped Slave" made famous in Graham Greene's The Comedians. It's a testament, whether one is religious or not, that the shame and horror of history often remains.As with last Sunday, bereft people will flock to the open fields beside the church rubble, and there they will begin their quiet petitioning of God for some sense of what they have just endured. They've faced tragedies before, but this is huge and its collateral damage has been the loss of entire families, the perishing of kin and friends. They will pray today with deep and signifiant holes in their hearts where people and normal life once existed. On Sundays, Haitians traditionally gather at the home of family members and consume pumpkin soup for brunch. Now there are no homes, no soup, and for many, tragically, no family.One Haitian man told me yesterday that he no longer knows what to make of God or life. He woke up to discover that his religious faith was far more predicated on family and property than he realized. Now that they are gone, he wonders if God has abandoned him as well.Albert Schweitzer once claimed:

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives."

If this is true, tragedy will reach new heights of sorrow today. Haitians will come to religious services half-dead inside and they will plead with God to make sense of their devastated lives. This is a deep and profound moment for the people of Haiti. Some will lose their faith while others come alive to its more profound dimensions. We in Canada have no right to judge this moment; it's their narrative and its ultimate truths are their to discover, one way or the other. It's too deep, too sacred, for us to judge or condemn. These people are looking at the bottom of the pit and they must determine what to make of it. It's better that those of us who pray intercede as we rarely have before. And for those who are not religious, provide a moment of empathy for a people now facing perhaps the most profound moment of their national life.