“She Is the Womb and the Tomb”: Kali the Destroyer Roars Through Asheville

My purpose here is not to conduct an exegesis of Kali and her role in the Hindu pantheon. That pantheon is almost impossibly diverse, complex, and nuanced, as is Kali herself. For expert testimony, I refer you again to Campbell’s colorful presentation above.

Much more to the point here is an exegesis of awe, if you will, at the violent forces of nature that shake our world to its very foundations, both outer and inner. And of how people grapple with understanding and accepting its reality.

Tour your own or most anyone’s social media accounts and you’ll no doubt behold scores of happy people and beautiful scenery, sometimes in one and the same photo. Beaches, lakes, streams, mountains, and flowers. Sunrises and sunsets galore.

All of it framing our parties, our holiday gatherings, our summer vacation tours of exotic locales.

Beauty beauty beauty, amidst seas of joy and contentment. Sweet and welcoming Mother Nature, holding us close to her bosom, soothing our modern, frazzled, hyperkinetic souls by modeling her perfect harmony.

Then here comes Kali/Helene, bringing ruin to it all.

A train car turned upside down, its undercarriage a mass of metal and wires we’d never been exposed to before, as if our grandma’s outer garments had blown away in a terrible gust and she is left in her underwear, vulnerable and exposed.

A shed of some type, nose down in the river, having created a new riffle for the water working around it, and a new perch for birds over the past three months.

God only knows how many more months it will languish there before some enterprising soul accesses the equipment and people-power to haul it back to terra firma and onto a truck bound for the recycling plant.

Or will it perhaps lie there in perpetuity half-drowned, a sober monument to all who suffered and lost so much in this catastrophe long since gone from the daily news, its vestiges of random paper and plastic and metal shards blown and pinned mutely against the riverside vegetation that somehow withstood the howling storm?

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Christianity most always ties itself in knots trying to contextualize natural disasters. The pure human evil model of murder and worse is easy: Humanity is fallen and needs God to keep it on the straight and narrow. Failing that, the devil beckons, constantly on the prowl to corrupt and blacken souls.

But floods, fires and earthquakes?

Some Christians blame these, too, on Satan, God’s bitter adversary till the end of time.

Others suggest God is behind disasters, but only as a form of fist-shaking judgment and warning to cease our continuing sinful ways.

Still others simply lament and accept the fact that in a fallen world of great natural beauty and literally earth-shaking disaster, we need continue to revel in the former and endure the latter, even as God weeps for us and extends a hand in compassion and solidarity.

God not as schizoid, but as grieving parent.

This is the essential message of the Incarnation, after all, God assuming earthly form to suffer as we do, to fully experience and stand with us in our plight—and to model a response to the suffering of others.

Hinduism gets out from under this entire conundrum with a pantheon of gods who carry different loads for managing all facets of existence, Kali uniquely tasked with making a mess of the very creation she and other gods have brought into being. If the gods are in the aggregate omnipotent, all-knowing and all-loving, then nothing is beyond their power, knowledge, or will. That means the buck stops with them, and with Kali in particular as she huffs and puffs a hurricane into being.

Kali would not even think about foisting disasters off on a devil or standing behind hi-falutin’ conjurings by learned theologians who can’t bring themselves to admit that God, at least by human standards, causes all manner of suffering and may even have a little problem controlling her temper.

“Hell yes it’s ME!” bellows Kali, unapologetic. “Who else has the power to pull this (fire, flood, earthquake) off?”

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Yes, I’m striking a light tone here, but it’s a dead serious matter. Suffering is universal, and when the earth—or our own bodies—turn against us, we feel a fierce need to ask it questions, to scratch and claw at it till it bleeds out some kind of meaning that can soothe our souls.

Campbell salutes this struggle by suggesting that understanding the essential two-sidedness of God as creator and destroyer is the beginning of wisdom. This is God as “ultimate reality,” for you more secularly-minded readers.

It’s just the way things are, yes?

And how should we think about those two sides of the reality we face in this beautiful and heart-breaking world? “With equal equanimity,” Campbell murmurs, lighting a candle against the darkness that so easily develops in the wake of tragedy.

Enough of “infantile, inappropriate sentimentalities and resentments,” of bewailing “the law and image of the nature of being.” Not at all different, actually, from the Whitmanesque vision discussed here two weeks ago, the Bard joining Campbell in not seeing “one cause or result lamentable at last in the universe.”

This doesn’t mean we don’t grieve catastrophe. Only that we not be consumed by it. And that we perhaps respond by enlisting another god—Lord Shiva, he of love and compassion, or any equivalent god of any other tradition—in doing what we can to repair the world that another god of ultimate reality has rent temporarily asunder.

Nothing lasts forever, after all, and the life force springs new and eternal with each breath and sigh of the world. That, too, is just the way things are.