Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 2:02am
Shaken up in Reno
Column: New Houses from Old Bricks
In Reno, a “swarm” of small earthquakes over the past few months has been local news for a while now. In the past week, our quakes have made national news after several of them passed the 4.0 magnitude mark on the Richter scale. Most of the quakes have been centered in an area less than five kilometers from my house. That’s close enough to be awakened from sleep, by quakes about 3.0 or greater.
We’re shaken up, and plenty of us are on edge. Here in northwest Reno, I know a few people who have gone to stay with friends or family further away just so they can get a good night’s sleep, and I don’t blame them. The unpredictability and the repetition are taking their toll. Even with the best positive thinking I can muster (“we’re all fine, it’s probably just another little one”), I can’t stop the instinctive fight-or-flight adrenaline rush when the house creaks and sways and the ground shifts under me. I can’t stop the racing heartbeat and the immediate fear: “Is this going to be a big one?” Or worse yet, THE Big One? (Living in the San Francisco area, I experienced the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which measured 6.9 on the Richter scale. That was a “big-enough one” for my lifetime.)
Worried by rumors that this swarm does in fact mean a “Big One” is coming, some people are buying out stores’ supplies of bottled water and the like. I’m all for emergency preparedness — I have my own kit including bottled water and food, flashlight, radio, etc. But how do you know the difference between “preparedness” and hysteria? Or the difference between staying informed, and becoming obsessed by the reports? (On the “obsessed” end of the spectrum, I keep checking the USGS website to count the quakes I’ve felt and see if I’ve missed any. There have been three tiny ones just in the time I’ve been writing this.)
As a pastor of a congregation, I wonder not only how to manage my own fears, but also how to care for others. What kinds of action and conversation are part of the solution, and which ones contribute to the problem by multiplying the anxiety?
Personally, I don’t find it too helpful to get wrapped up in predictions. While there is much that seismologists do know, earthquakes are essentially unpredictable. Even if you could predict the time and location (an ability which no one claims, to my knowledge), you can’t predict the exact effect on a given structure, which is based on many factors.
Still, it’s human nature to look for knowledge as power and therefore a kind of control. Where earthquakes are concerned, we don’t have much of any of those. As human beings who don’t have much control over many aspects of our lives, we should probably be more used to this. Thanks to the illusions of power that keep us feeling more-or-less safe, our lack of control surprises us sometimes. But earthquakes are an area where it’s much harder to maintain the illusion. There’s not enough “emergency preparedness” in the world to control the earth’s movement or to shield us completely from its potential effects.
In the church, we should probably be able to address this. Powerlessness and lack of control, after all, are fundamental spiritual issues. But even in the church, our illusions of power persist, and our lack of control often surprises us. In the church and outside it, people sometimes refer to natural disasters as “acts of God.” I’ve never liked that phrase, because I don’t believe in a God who delights in disasters or creates them in order to punish or teach. I get the connection, though: humans’ lack of control is something God and disasters have in common.
I wonder: could accepting that actually free us from the need to control? It’s a risky freedom, to be sure, and it might not all turn out the way we hope. It may be true that this swarm is in fact leading up to the Big One, rather than releasing pressure little by little. (I prefer to believe the latter until proven otherwise, as that theory seems to release the pressure of hysteria, too.) We don’t know that. And while we’re waiting to see how it turns out, the freedom not to know seems preferable to the constant feeling that we ought to be doing something about this thing we can’t do anything about.
Could we actually live in that freedom, even while the ground is shaking under us? That might require an act of God.
— — —
Rev. Rebecca Schlatter is an ordained minister in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Reno, Nevada. You can contact her at newhousesfromoldbricks@hotmail.com. © copyright 2007 by Rebecca Schlatter
We’re shaken up, and plenty of us are on edge. Here in northwest Reno, I know a few people who have gone to stay with friends or family further away just so they can get a good night’s sleep, and I don’t blame them. The unpredictability and the repetition are taking their toll. Even with the best positive thinking I can muster (“we’re all fine, it’s probably just another little one”), I can’t stop the instinctive fight-or-flight adrenaline rush when the house creaks and sways and the ground shifts under me. I can’t stop the racing heartbeat and the immediate fear: “Is this going to be a big one?” Or worse yet, THE Big One? (Living in the San Francisco area, I experienced the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which measured 6.9 on the Richter scale. That was a “big-enough one” for my lifetime.)
Worried by rumors that this swarm does in fact mean a “Big One” is coming, some people are buying out stores’ supplies of bottled water and the like. I’m all for emergency preparedness — I have my own kit including bottled water and food, flashlight, radio, etc. But how do you know the difference between “preparedness” and hysteria? Or the difference between staying informed, and becoming obsessed by the reports? (On the “obsessed” end of the spectrum, I keep checking the USGS website to count the quakes I’ve felt and see if I’ve missed any. There have been three tiny ones just in the time I’ve been writing this.)
As a pastor of a congregation, I wonder not only how to manage my own fears, but also how to care for others. What kinds of action and conversation are part of the solution, and which ones contribute to the problem by multiplying the anxiety?
Personally, I don’t find it too helpful to get wrapped up in predictions. While there is much that seismologists do know, earthquakes are essentially unpredictable. Even if you could predict the time and location (an ability which no one claims, to my knowledge), you can’t predict the exact effect on a given structure, which is based on many factors.
Still, it’s human nature to look for knowledge as power and therefore a kind of control. Where earthquakes are concerned, we don’t have much of any of those. As human beings who don’t have much control over many aspects of our lives, we should probably be more used to this. Thanks to the illusions of power that keep us feeling more-or-less safe, our lack of control surprises us sometimes. But earthquakes are an area where it’s much harder to maintain the illusion. There’s not enough “emergency preparedness” in the world to control the earth’s movement or to shield us completely from its potential effects.
In the church, we should probably be able to address this. Powerlessness and lack of control, after all, are fundamental spiritual issues. But even in the church, our illusions of power persist, and our lack of control often surprises us. In the church and outside it, people sometimes refer to natural disasters as “acts of God.” I’ve never liked that phrase, because I don’t believe in a God who delights in disasters or creates them in order to punish or teach. I get the connection, though: humans’ lack of control is something God and disasters have in common.
I wonder: could accepting that actually free us from the need to control? It’s a risky freedom, to be sure, and it might not all turn out the way we hope. It may be true that this swarm is in fact leading up to the Big One, rather than releasing pressure little by little. (I prefer to believe the latter until proven otherwise, as that theory seems to release the pressure of hysteria, too.) We don’t know that. And while we’re waiting to see how it turns out, the freedom not to know seems preferable to the constant feeling that we ought to be doing something about this thing we can’t do anything about.
Could we actually live in that freedom, even while the ground is shaking under us? That might require an act of God.
— — —
Rev. Rebecca Schlatter is an ordained minister in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Reno, Nevada. You can contact her at newhousesfromoldbricks@hotmail.com. © copyright 2007 by Rebecca Schlatter