Compassion
Photographs, videos and reports from Turkey and Syria in the aftermath of Monday’s earthquake give us at best a superficial glimpse of the devastation. As bad as it looks, most of us cannot truly comprehend the immensity of the tragedy and destruction. As I’m writing two days after the earthquake, the death toll has neared 17,000 and will certainly continue to climb.
In September 1985 when he was 11 years old, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens experienced the 8.0 magnitude earthquake in Mexico City that killed at least 5,000 people. This experience, plus another years later when he was reporting on an earthquake in Pakistan, gives him a particular insight into the terror and desperation being experienced today by the people of Turkey and Syria. He also understands that the impact of an earthquake is far deeper than the destruction we see with our eyes.
“Earthquakes,” he wrote in a column this week, “are always said to be ‘natural’ disasters. It’s a misleading term. The real disaster is almost always man-made, often in the form of poorly constructed homes and buildings with insufficient rebar and other structural supports, followed by incompetent crisis management in the aftermath of the catastrophe.”
In other words, it’s a disaster made from indifference, inhumanity and injustice. The poor and the marginalized, those who live in substandard housing, those who lack sufficient resources to meet the most basic human needs are the ones most likely to lose their homes and to die in earthquakes and other disasters. Stephens was understandably traumatized as a child by the Mexico City earthquake, but his family and his home survived unscathed because they lived with means and privilege. “To this day I think about how very lucky we were, and ache for so many who were not.”
In the letter of James in the New Testament we read, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” (James 1:27) Too many people who call themselves Christians focus more on being “unstained” than on how they “care” for those society has left behind. Purity of belief is too often prioritized over purity of compassion.
How many more widows and orphans are there in Turkey and Syria today than there were on Sunday? How might we practice true religion by caring for them and for all those who have been pushed down by indifference, inhumanity and injustice? We don’t need to look across the globe to find them. They live in our city and in our neighborhoods. “Even in the age of Ukraine and other disasters,” Stephens wrote, “can we still muster a sustained sense of charity and compassion to help, intelligently, in the long recovery that lies ahead?”
If you want to support relief efforts in Turkey and Syria, go to Episcopal Relief & Development and donate today. Your gift will go directly to support those in the most need.