The central story of the Malaysian plane shot down over the Ukraine is a story of people — of the 298 people who died on the plane, of their relatives, friends, fellow countrypersons, and of all who share with them a common humanity. Each person who died and each person who grieves them is a person, each with their own hopes, loving and loved by others, each with commitments and plans made null in an instant.
The deepest questions these deaths raise are the unavoidable questions that face us all: questions about the patent precariousness and vulnerability of our lives, about what matters to us when our grasp on the future is so tenuous, about the mysterious conjunction of love, loss, pain and gift, and about the capacity of the human heart for evil and the terrible consequences that follow.
These questions are best pondered in silence and shared in intimacy, not answered in a sermon. In our first response to the crash our common humanity is better expressed in sorrow than in curiosity, in sympathy than outrage, in pondering than declaration, in prayer than in cursing.
The news that many passengers on the plane were travelling to an International Conference on HIV Aids in Melbourne was especially poignant. Accompanying people with HIV AIDS also takes us into deep human places: of illness, loss, stigma, heroism and faithfulness. That people who may have given their lives to enhancing other people's lives by healing and accepting, preventing death and encouraging empathy should have their lives and their contribution to life cut short in a momentary act of violence is a dark mystery.
For some, it will confirm the conviction that altruism is futile; others will find in the lives so sacrificed a testimony to a love that is stronger than the things that make for death.
In the coming days questions about who, what, why, where and how will be pursued exhaustively. There will be time for curiosity, outrage, declaration and making plans. But if we have the resources for it, these responses are best built on a pause for grief, for fellow feeling, for attentiveness to the mystery of life, good and evil, and — if it is open to us — for prayer for people whose lives took off but then fell unexpectedly into the earth.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.