Desperate hands clawing the wreckage for loved ones, mouths twisted in silent scream, torn limbs, bloodied bodies, tears tracking down dust-grayed faces… we sit in our living rooms and watch, transfixed, as newscasters tell us of the current calamity to strike the small island nation of Haiti.

"It is the worst disaster in United Nations history," we hear a senior UN official say, and we wonder at the horror of it, at the horror of a country routinely savaged by tropical storms, floods, earthquakes, violence, political instability, and crushing poverty.

These are people just like us, we might think as we watch, wondering how they will yet again rise up from the ashes of their besieged neighborhoods and communities. They have families they want to protect, interests they want to pursue; they hurt and yearn and hope and laugh just like we do And we wonder what, besides an accident of birth, so often spares us the kind of trauma they so regularly endure.

We watch, transfixed, pulling out our checkbooks as we follow the images of aid workers pouring in to do what they can – to search the ruins, bury the dead, treat the broken, unite the separated and to apportion life-giving supplies as they seep in. And somewhere in it all we recognize the connection we have with these people, the universality of the human condition. The gauzy web of all existence is solidified for us, making more real the words below by poet Robert Walsh.

– Beth Lefever, Student Minister

When the great plates slip
and the earth shivers and the flaw is seen
to lie in what you trusted most, look not
to more solidity, to weighty slabs
of concrete poured or strength of cantilevered
beam to save the fractured order. Trust
more the tensile strands of love that bend
and stretch to hold you in the web of life
that’s often torn but always healing. There’s
your strength. The shifting plates, the restive earth,
your room, your precious life, they all proceed
from love, the ground on which we walk together.