The Woman's Word: Spring and Earthquake

The Woman's Word

With the dawn of April, spring returns; the meadows and hills grow green, embroidered with red and yellow — a delight to the eye as far as the eye can see... Warmth spreads through the air, and people go forth in their joy and gladness into the open, into the arms of Mother Nature, after deserting her for months to escape the cold of winter and its bitter chill. And how often has Nature received her children — for all their ingratitude — with a radiant face and trills of joy, filling their hearts with gladness and with green, dewy hope.

It was spring's custom, when it visited us with April, to come gently, laden with blessings and bounties; never before today have we known it as a treacherous criminal, shaking its earthquake in the bowels of the earth, so that the mountains sway and tremble, one thing crashes down upon another, and buildings become ruins, folding beneath their rubble bodies crushed and suffocated...

We never knew spring — this gentle, beautiful one — to harbor black evil against us: taking lives and, with dreadful savagery, driving into homelessness thousands of innocents — in the surrender and weakness of children, women, and the old — pleading for the mercy of heaven and the compassion of their fellow men against nature's violence. And oh, the tyranny of nature in the hour she strikes! She leaves in every heart a pang, and on every cheek a tear!

If national calamities are the touchstone of magnanimity, then — praise be to God — our magnanimity has not run dry. In people's eagerness, from far and near, and in their rush to bring aid, lies the shining proof that men are still, to one another, brothers and helpers; and that disasters heal the hearts' chronic wounds and gather what had drawn apart into a single sheaf, each bending tenderly over the other in pure, benevolent love...

And if calamities are the touchstone of men, we have not lacked among us men who are men indeed — in daring, in chivalry, in openness of hand.

And if woman is, at her core, a zealous and conscious citizen, how fitting for her here to prove in practice that, in facing calamities, she is man's equal... Is not the field of sacrifice and consolation her very own field? Toward the shattered heart she has her own feminine path to healing; toward the stricken families she has her own path to reuniting them and rebuilding; she handles matters by the inspiration of her great heart, in which mercy is never stinted, and no barrier holds her back from her humane goal.

Blessed be the striving woman — how deep a faith is hers, above all when her essence is pure and her metal refined... Our Lord, deprive us not — we beseech Thee — of the zealous and virtuous citizen.

And O wrathful spring, temper your excess, kiss the wounds of our hearts, and spread in them solace and safety.

The Editor-in-Chief