Collapse

Just horrific. The city is under a period of mourning after the bridge collapse yesterday. We had been expecting a strange week, anticipating a large religious festival to either cause violence or unrest. But nobody was prepared for the magnitude of this tragedy; in a place accustomed to the senseless loss of life, this is beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend God’s will. Religion is part of the background noise here; we’re always labeling and referring to people, places, issues, dates, objects, customs and relationships according to some religious categorization. Words like secularist, imam, holy, reformer and follower make up a large portion of my vocabulary; and their use is without any context of practice and thus weightless tags. A surgeon may imagine parts of a female body; if it is his wife it will not be the same picture. The proximity of violent death also makes religion a component of the atmosphere. The perplexing difference between what is and what was. Religion seems to be stretched taut between two equally incomprehensible ends of a spectrum. In one direction it defines an utter submission of human behavior to automatic servitude which I cannot comprehend, and in the other it reaches out to define some hazy limitlessness beyond the scope of any philosophy. In between it provides comfort for some, and a method for others. And we see the floods and the storms and the fires and we make a little choice about our place in this world against the backdrop of the things that we cannot know.