In Stressful Times We Question God, but Turn to Mom

When the power was back on, when the images of devastation emerged from the TV screen, 7-year-old Leslie turned to his mother.

“How can God let those things happen?”

Different people would offer different answers. One might be: “There is no God, kid. What more proof do you need?” But Lita is raising her children as Christians. She struggled to explain.

“I told him, ‘God is tired from bad people. He’s tired from the people killing each other. From kids killing parents, parents abusing kids. He wants everybody to change. He wants everybody to have a chance to change. So he lets those things happen.”

It is accepted that He works in mysterious ways. Innocent people suffer, Lita told her son, to warn everybody, especially the bad people.

Leslie put it in His own words.

“God didn’t want to do this, and He feels sorry,” the boy explained. “But He had to do so the people will change a little bit.”

*

We question God, but we turn to Mom. We wonder about the existence of one; if not for the other, we wouldn’t exist. The image of God is of the Father, a bearded sage reaching to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But it is Mother Nature, Mother Earth, who nurtures and provides. Dad is the disciplinarian. Mom kisses us to make it better.

These days, I don’t ask Mom much about God or why the world is so unfair. But when the phone rang Monday morning, there was little question who was calling. Those instincts kick in every time.

Yes, I told her, everything’s fine. My old house danced but it didn’t slide down the slope. Some glass broke and the power is out, I told her, but everything’s OK. How are things down in Santa Ana?

“We’re worried about you.” This is a given from the woman who once gave homemade “earthquake survival kits” at Christmas. “They seem to be coming closer and closer.”

Don’t they though.

On the morning of Feb. 9, 1971, I was awakened by my father’s shouts in time to realize that my bed was rolling across the room. The epicenter, in Sylmar, was almost 70 miles away, but fearful moms and dads pressured school officials to tear down and rebuild several schools that had been constructed before codes adopted after the 1933 Long Beach quake. My junior high was one.

For the next 16 years, though I always lived here in earthquake country, I never felt more than a minor tremor. Then, on Oct. 1, 1987, the roar and crash of the Whittier quake had me running for my life. I was almost out the front door when it dawned on me that it would be better to die indoors than risk arrest for indecent exposure. I planted myself in a doorway--an interior doorway. My cat, Lou, no dummy, got between my feet and dug his claws into the carpet.

Yes, Mom, they’re coming closer--in interval and proximity. The Loma Prieta quake in ‘89, which scattered devastation around the Bay Area and communities to the south, showed us what a 7.1 temblor could do. In the last four years, we Southern Californians have been rocked by Upland in ‘90, Sierra Madre in ‘91, and Joshua Tree and the “twin temblors” of Big Bear and Landers in ’92. And now the monster from Northridge, still alive with its aftershocks.

Mom has always told us to be ready, though it took a while for the message to sink in with her youngest. After the Whittier quake, I hired a structural engineer to draw up plans for seismic reinforcement of a hillside house that wasn’t even bolted to its foundation. It wasn’t until after Sierra Madre that I finally hired a contractor to do the work, including installation of plywood panels that engineers say might have prevented the deadly disaster at the Northridge Meadows apartments.

The house has been on the market for seven months. Suddenly, the bolts and plywood seem like an excellent selling point.

*

Lita is a housekeeper who has become a friend. We stood in my kitchen Wednesday morning, debating the relative merits of God and science, as Leslie, who wants “to write movies” when he grows up, watched cartoons in the living room.

Lita shrugged. Just as my mother pestered me to be ready, Leslie knows to get under a doorway. Still, Lita is of the mind that, no matter what, you can’t be completely safe. You never know when the ground might open up and swallow your house.

That happened in an earthquake back in Guatemala, Lita said, when she was just a little girl. In her grandpa’s town, an old village built entirely of adobe, not a single home was left standing. Entire families died. Miraculously, everyone in Lita’s family survived. God, Lita suggests, wants us to reinforce our souls.

“I tell Leslie, ‘We have to really be good inside. Because whatever happens, we have to be ready.’ ”