on London from the Bible belt—
july 7, 2005
by kathy godfrey

It’s raining steadily and would be a comforting bookish sort of day except that I am listening to news coverage about the bombings in London–The Secret Al Qaeda of Europe apparently claiming credit. I’m sick. And I am surprised by my strong reaction to the news about a place I have never been. My stomach is turning and my chest is tight just like when I was eight and listening to the Vietnam news through the thin walls of my room where I was supposed to be asleep. Cold fear causing me to shiver even under a pile of Beacon blankets. What was going to happen? That was the worry that kept me rigid and sleepless in the third grade. What was going to happen to my world? Even then I knew that just because the war was half a world away didn’t mean that I was untouched or that anyone was untouched. I knew that everyone was in danger, and no one else seemed to understand this. I lay staring at the ceiling imagining all the ways this danger might manifest itself. The meanness of war could spread and spread like the measles until everyone was fighting and bleeding and dying. Or war might roll and spread like the blob from Shock Theater until it swallowed all of us up. Or worst of all, I thought God could be sick of us and our evil hearts and might rain down fire or send the horsemen early or open a crack in the ground and bury us all. Start over with a new heaven and new earth. I just didn’t know. But I knew that nothing good could come of all that fighting and dying.

That’s how I feel right now. Like I don’t have any idea what may really happen, but I don’t see anything good. How sad that my shoulders relaxed a little when I heard that only thirty-seven are confirmed dead. Only thirty-seven. I feel guilty knowing that to someone those thirty-seven were so many, too many. Imagine it. Londoners packing the trains and buses headed off to work on a Thursday morning. Some of them were carrying mugs of tea or coffee, or is that an American thing? Some with briefcases and responsibility in their hands, some with anger in their hearts that they had to go to this or that place for money everyday when they’d rather be somewhere making music or scribbling poetry or painting in some wild heather. Some of them were mothers anxious about leaving their children in the care of very capable but not their mother’s hands. Or is that an American plight as well?

Some of them were in love, for the first time even, hadn’t been to sleep because they didn’t want to waste one minute when they could talk to her one more hour, smell her hair and rest their leg across the small of her bare back. Oh no, they wouldn’t close their eyes at all for fear that she would change while they slept, or disappear, or prove to be a dream. Maybe the “only thirty-seven” who died were recently reborn and just diving into a new life with the enthusiasm of a two-year-old. Maybe there was a new job, new calling, new love, new perspective.

O r maybe those thirty-seven were right in the middle of loving their same old lives: their spouse of twenty years, the home where they grew up, the job they’d had since graduation, the friends they’d known all their lives, all their lives now over. And the seeming worst part of the whole wretched thing, they had no idea that the same comforting life was nearly over when they made their way to the morning train smelling of breakfast meat or lavender or Earl Grey.

None of us know. That was the real fear I cultivated on my top bunk clutching my pillow with sweaty hands. I just didn’t know what would happen to me. Very real. We don’t know. I suppose that is a blessing and a curse as well as the source of all the literature and films imagining our own end just as I did at eight. The imagining gives us some illusion of control. In doomsday films, millions of people die but a few defy the odds, defeat the enemy, and survive, and when we are watching we are never in the millions. We are the heroes, the survivors, the ones who figured the whole thing out. We have control even though millions didn’t. Very comforting in a future of such uncertainty.

When I lay in my bed and imagined the giant earthquake that ended the world and made my heart race and my bladder instantly full, I did not imagine that I would fall down a big crack and be gone, over, dead. I imagined great trials, stress and pain but finally, God would help me. I would figure it out, like a puzzle, and I would survive. I would jump the cracks as they opened up. I would cling to the side of a new ravine and claw my way to the top. There would be a Red-Sea miracle. I would find a giant rock face and sit safely in the middle of it while earth fell away around me, or I would ride a boulder to rest at the bottom of a canyon. I would survive. I once heard a woman on a plane behind me planning how she would escape and swim to safety if we crashed over some body of water, and I thought “How ridiculous. If we crash, we are dead.” And I didn’t even recall how I used to plan such survival. In fact, that planning was the only thing I could know for sure because we don’t know, do we?

Did those Londoners ride to work thousands of times and at least occasionally imagine that their train could be blown off its track? Did they imagine how they would anticipate the attack and see the one way that they could live through the thing while others sat ignorantly waiting for their deadly fate? Do those who survived think it was because they were better prepared, more in control, or more pleasing to the God they carry in their emergency plans? That is, some say, why we created elaborate deities who can control our future when we can’t, and of course there is always a way for us to take back a bit of control by sacrifice or supplication.

Suddenly it seems so ridiculous that we could or even should be able to change the plans of our omnipotent, omniscient God. How could we presume to know better from our tiny pinhole view of the universe what is best? Have we been taught to be a puppet to our fear, to seek relationship with a creator so that we can have a better survival kit? Is our notion of God just another rock to cling to until the upheaval swallows everyone else up and leaves us standing alone pitying people who were less prepared? Are we cowering in the shadow of the news, clutching our “safe” ride to work and planning, with God’s exclusive blessing, to be the survivors?

 

Kathy Godfrey, M.A. was born and raised in the Asheville area. She teaches English and Literature at AB Tech and is currently working on a collection of short stories and poetry with the support of her husband, Dale, and cats, Hunky and Possom. [ dalekat@charter.net ]