Recently I visited Napier on New Zealand’s East Coast for the first time. I went to the parish of St. Mary’s, Taradale, to do an appeal for our Columban magazine.
Napier was at the centre of one of the worst earthquakes ever to hit this country. In 1931 a quake measuring 7.8 killed 256 people in the Hawke’s Bay area. It changed the shape of the landscape in dramatic and significant ways, and with the fires that followed, destroyed many buildings around the city. Napier was rebuilt and the Art Deco style in which much of the reconstruction work was done is now a major feature of the city and one that draws many visitors.
I found myself thinking of the old saying of making a virtue of necessity. Just as earthquakes can reshape a landscape so also seismic shifts can happen in people’s personal landscapes, most especially in the way they see the world. Sometimes the events that trigger this kind of profound change are joy-filled - we might have an experience that awakens us to the mystery and beauty of life in such a powerful way that we never see life in quite the same way as we did before. Our sense of the world is remade and becomes a feature of our lives from that time on.
More often than not, what happens to create this kind of dramatic change is not pleasant. We find that we have to rebuild because a destructive force has rocked the foundations on which we have built our lives. It can happen in many different ways – someone we love dies, we lose a job, we get bad news about our state of health, we recognise that we are getting old. Or we get caught in debt or an addictive pattern of some kind, possibly a web of lies. It is hard to start over again when the very ground is taken from under us.
There are some who, for one reason or another, find it hard to come to terms with the change so life becomes an ongoing struggle for them. Our hearts go out to them. Yet we also know that there is a remarkable resilience in the human spirit. Many people manage to put life back together again after a disaster has broken it apart. It is not as it was before and many scars remain. But often there is a style of living that emerges from the experience that becomes a defining characteristic of the person and a feature of them that other people notice and respond to.
On a final note we see how our species is changing the landscape of Earth in ways that are large scale and far reaching in their impact. So as well as reflecting on the human capacity to rebuild we need also to tap into our ability to recognise danger signs and take the kind of preventative measures that can help to avert disasters in the future.
Fr Patrick O'Shea resides at St Columban's Lower Hutt, New Zealand.