Fr. Frank Grappoli, presently treasurer and mission procurator for the Xaverian Missionaries in the USA, spent several years as a missionary in Indonesia. Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, suffered the worst devastation and by far the greatest number of deaths in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami of last December. Here Fr. Grappoli speaks of his apprehensions.
e’re in Easter time as I write down these brief reflections on the tsunami, which, the day after Christmas, hit southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular. These past few days another earthquake has hit the island of Nias on the western coast of Sumatra. Again thousands of dead are being counted. Twice in three months, the peaceful and picturesque shores of North Sumatra and some nearby islands have experienced nature’s fury. Indonesia is in tears… and it does not want to be consoled because her children, by the many thousands, have been snatched away, never to return… Large areas devastated, cities and villages razed to the ground.
To the survivors the ordeal has been as a series of bad dreams… The appalling loss of life and destruction leave many questions that fall into an emptiness that cannot be filled… The calamity is still too heavy to bear.
Father Vincenzo Baravalle, the Provincial Superior of the Xaverian Missionaries in Indonesia, says that the initial urgency for food, shelter and medicines have been met by local, international and faith organizations. The problem of the refugees, in the hundreds of thousands, has been taken care of.
Fishermen who have lost everything are being given boats with motors and nets; bicycles have been distributed, for ravaged roads are still in great disrepair.
Young people face an especially bleak future. Many university students, who hailed from areas worse hit and have lost family and relatives, have had to abandon their studies.
“After four months since the tsunami – says Fr. Baravalle – the emergency period has passed, when the charitable response was ‘phenomenal.’ Now the cameras and microphones of foreign reporters have mostly been turned off in search of ‘other news.’ And we must return our attention to the toll that tidal waves of poverty, ignorance, and disease that take on millions of people, every day, and not only in Indonesia.
“It is necessary to pray much also for the missionaries because over and beyond the material help offered to our people, there are questions which can only be approached through a faith-filled witness, a faith that produces works.”
When God created this world, God put energies into the universe that we have not begun to tap. God does not jump in and out of creation to change the laws that God made in the beginning. I do believe that God, loving and caring, is present both in natural tragedies, such as the earthquake and tsunami, and in human-made tsunamis, such as the Iraq war or the Holocaust.
I believe God’s goodness is present and grieves with us when tragedy happens, even when God cannot stop the tragedy from happening. God’s grief must be great at the present time! I believe faith and prayer is one of the ways to tap our inner energies and then minister to God’s grief by serving the suffering. The tsunami is a wake-up call to everyone in the global village that our brothers and sisters need our compassion and help. So, we comfort the sorrowful, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and rebuild the devastated society. Our faith demands it. At the time of the tsunami, Pope John Paul II said, “Faith teaches us that even in the most difficult and painful trials, as in the disaster which struck in Southeast Asia, God never abandons us.”
We read in the book of Jonah: “In my distress I called upon the Lord… You cast me into the depths, into the heart of the ocean, and the flood closed around me; all your surging waves swept over me.. The water about me rose to my neck, for the deep was closing over me; seaweed twined about my head… I was sinking into a void whose bars would hold me fast forever.” (Jonah 2)
I mull over this biblical text, asking for light and understanding, the light that reverberates on us from the manger of Bethlehem and from the hill of Calvary and leads to the new life of the Resurrection.
(From Xaverian Mission Newsletter)