The Appalling Spectacle Of Woe And The Smiling Faces At Summer Camp

On Voltaire and Kerr County

On the morning of Sunday, November 1st, 1755, an earthquake struck Lisbon, Portugal. Though measurements of quakes weren’t kept at the time, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, it was probably on the magnitude of 8.5-9.0, the second worst in European history. It was All Saints’ Day, that Sunday, so many of the dead, upwards of 30,000, including children, were in churches that collapsed on them — there were no building codes back then — burying them alive.

They were in prayer.

Along with the conflagration that occurred, the quake also triggered a tsunami that produced 20-foot high waves, flooding the city that hadn’t already been decimated, killing even more. Aftershocks killed still more.

Independence Day Weekend, 270 years later, in Kerr County, Texas, flash floods hit the Hill Country, a region spanning the central and southern part of the state. In under two hours, the Guadalupe River swelled beyond its banks, swallowing two-story buildings. More than 100 are confirmed dead — and that number will surely increase — including 28 girls and counselors from Camp Mystic.

Camp Mystic is a Christian camp.

They were in prayer.

Within weeks of the Lisbon quake, Voltaire wrote: "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster."

Here are four of the verses:

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, "All's well,"
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts--
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: "You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God"?
Say ye, o'er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
"God is avenged: the wage of sin is death"?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother's breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

Would it console the sad inhabitants
Of these aflame and desolated shores
To say to them: "Lay down your lives in peace;
For the world's good your homes are sacrificed;
Your ruined palaces shall others build,
For other peoples shall your walls arise;
The North grows rich on your unhappy loss;
Your ills are but a link in general law;
To God you are as those low creeping worms
That wait for you in your predestined tombs"?
What speech to hold to victims of such ruth!
Add not such cruel outrage to their pain.

But how conceive a God supremely good,
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
And came it from no other, for he 's lord:
Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!
O wondrous mingling of diversities!
A God came down to lift our stricken race:
He visited the earth, and changed it not!
One sophist says he had not power to change;
"He had," another cries, "but willed it not:
In time he will, no doubt." And, while they prate,
The hidden thunders, belched from underground,
Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns
Across the smiling face of Portugal.

A caliph once, when his last hour had come,
This prayer addressed to him he reverenced:
"To thee, sole and all-powerful king, I bear
What thou dost lack in thy immensity--
Evil and ignorance, distress and sin."
He might have added one thing further--hope.

Within 48 hours of the initial flooding, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a Day of Prayer Proclamation, in which he wrote, “Whereas, throughout our history, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer,” and then beseeches God for “merciful intervention” even as “the waters rage.”

He then asks Texans of all faiths and religious traditions and backgrounds to offer God more prayers.