As we pray for those affected by the Los Angeles fires – still burning and uncontained as I write – the significance of this tragedy should not be lost. The whole area is devastated, a charred, barren landscape Biblical in proportion, with thousands of multi-million-dollar mansions – some of the most expensive real estate on earth – burned to cinders and ashes. We may thank God that most lives were spared.
Speaking of Biblical, we may ask: Why Hollywood? One answer might be the mysterious one that Christ offers to those crushed by the tower:
Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Silo’am fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. (Lk 13:4)
Yet, at the same time, we also believe that the providence of God is ‘concrete and immediate’ (CCC, #303) with not a sparrow falling to the ground without Him knowing and willing it. (Mt 10:29).
We are also called to discern the signs of the times (cf., Mt 24; Lk 21:3). Some acts of God’s providence are more significant than others, as a warning and a spur to repentance, that metanoia with which Christ opens His Gospel. Bigger barns, bigger mansions and all that.
The thing is, Hollywood already was a moral ‘inferno’, in the Dantean sense. As someone close to me has said more than once, he – along almost everyone of our generation – was ‘raised by television and movies’, which is to say, almost all of which was spewed forth by studios as the visual equivalent of toxic junk food. Even ‘good’ films and shows had sexual innuendo, burrowing into our minds and souls, which over time became more explicit and more deviant. There were other evils, plot lines advocating deceit, lying, avarice, bloodlust, revenge. Anything to do with the Church and moral virtue were portrayed as repressive, old-fashioned, out-of-date, if not downright evil. Virginity and chastity, bad, fornication and adultery, good. Family life, of course, didn’t fare much better, with fathers coming across as bumpkins and hypocrites. Cast off your conscience, live according to your unbridled passions, and damn the consequences.
We can’t read the mind of God, and we shouldn’t schadenfreude at the suffering of others. Perhaps this is a ‘random’ event, like those of Siloam, but one can’t help but get a slight whiff of fire and brimstone. If so, it’s a whiff meant for all of us, for none of us is guiltless. But it’s better such here and now, when repentance is possible, than in the next life, when it is not. Life and the goods of this life, as Pope Benedict warns in his Spe Salvi, are precarious. Our hope must not be in them, nor in this life – all the hyparchonta – but in heaven, the hyparxin, eternal beatitude, and the anchor and goal of all our striving.
There is a silver lining, with reports that the L.A. and its Fire Department are rife with D.E.I. mania, and whose current chief, apparently a quota-hire, a strident lesbian raising three children with her ‘partner’ (and I’d rather not delve into whence those children derived). The hydrants are apparently all dry. Did no one think to check water sources and reservoir levels? And what of proper brush cutting, fire swathes and so on? We shouldn’t lay blame a priori, and things will come out in the wash. I suppose one can only be so prepared for such an actus Dei, as is said in the insurance business (and curious that many fire insurance policies were cancelled not long before this inferno). But, like the Boy Scouts, prepared they must be, and prepared, it seems, they were not.
Perhaps this will properly wake up the woke millionaires of Malibu, that D.E.I. is a place institutions go to die. At the very least, maybe now they’ll elect the competent and the sane. And who knows? As the rebuilding begins, they may even start making good films again.