The next to last time I saw Dr. James Young, former Chief Coroner of Ontario, was 23 years ago in the Penetanguishene General Hospital. He was at my feet, having arrived only minutes earlier, attending at the birth of my second child. He called my husband Gordon to witness the birth of our daughter and welcome her with loving hands into the world.

I wept last night when I saw Dr. Young again, this time on television in his role as the leader of the Canadian identification team in Phuket, Thailand. He spoke plainly and directly, like the family doctor he was in my rural Ontario town. I’ve seen him quite a few times on television, at inquests, after Halifax’s Swiss Air disaster, in New York City after September 11th, in Bali, during the SARS outbreak.

The last time I saw him in person was when he gave the four of us diphtheria, polio, tetanus, cholera and Hepatitis C vaccinations so that we could go to the diocese of West Malaysia as Partners in Mission from the Anglican Church of Canada. We raised our children in southeast Asia. Finding Christ there before us in our neighbours’ and colleagues’ welcoming hospitality transformed our lives and ministries. Gordon and I calculate our lives before and after Malaysia.

Recently, in order to write articles about our south Asian partners’ responses to the tsunami, I spent the day with e-mails that have come into PWRDF from Kumi Samuels of the Women in Media Collective in Sri Lanka, and S. Sooriyakumary and C. S. Chandrahasan of the OfERR Sri Lankan refugee organization in India. Their words … and sentences that trail off into silence … add faces and stories to those I see on the news.

Because of Mr. Chandrahasan and OfERR, I know that there is a 12-year-old refugee girl named Keerthika who was washed away by the tsunami wave. Her family, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India, had only recently moved to the Keelputhupattu camp where her father had found employment in the fishing colony, also washed away. But Keerthika has not been effaced, unvalued and rubbed out. She is named and mourned.

For many of us, and certainly for relatives and friends, the faces and stories of people like Keerthika, open eyes to see, hearts to sorrow, and minds to act with compassionate generosity. For me last night, it was Jim Young. He shouldn’t be there doing the job he’s doing. But he is exactly where he needs to be. As those two truths shift inside me, compassion happens and tears flow.

The root metaphor for God’s compassion comes from the Hebrew word rechem or “womb.” Compassion is not a one-way transaction. The womb from which compassion flows receives a seed, and inanimate seeds — neither dead nor alive — hold promise. Emptying tears from opened eyes water the implanted seed. Into what do those seeds grow? To what will we give birth, all of us?

As part of a collective of women’s rights groups in Sri Lanka, Kumi Samuels has been active in fact-finding missions among tsunami refugees. Their reports of rapes, molestation and physical abuse of women and girls in unsupervised rescue operations have been reported in the Canadian media. Less column space has been given to the collective’s concern and recommendations for the special needs of pregnant women and lactating mothers. Already culturally at risk because of their gender, physically at risk because of their procreative status, traumatized by sudden and instantaneous death for which they had no preparation, pregnant women and nursing mothers are further at risk of effacement in the rescue and rebuilding process.

There is a distinct phase of the birthing process, after the amniotic waters have broken and just before the child emerges, called transition. It is the time when trained rhythmic breathing can no longer deal with the pain and rapid irregularity of uterine contractions. You lose a sense of control, and it is frightening during first time childbirth. The second time you know it’s a sign—a sign that the child is ready to emerge. During transition the cervix undergoes effacement, a medical term for the natural process of the shortening and thinning of the uterine cervix walls as they dilate during labour in order for birth to occur.

The two truths of effacement shift inside me, and hope germinates. We all bear seeds from this disaster that call us to open our eyes and hearts, turn around, and go in a different direction. We are called to ongoing conversion as we live and die our faith. “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above…Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.” (John 3.3, 5)

We are all in transition together, moving into a vulnerable future seeded with promise. God is here at the heart of the pain and compassion. And God reaches out for us with loving hands from a future we cannot yet see.