A decade has passed since a tsuna­mi dev­as­tat­ed vil­lages in 13 Asian coun­tries, which remind­ed me that some­where I have a plas­tic sand­wich bag filled with rupees.

The rupees are among the memen­toes of a woman I cher­ished.  She went to Kudanku­lam, a fish­ing vil­lage on the south­ern tip of the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent, ten years ago to pro­vide med­ical care to the tsunami’s survivors.

The cat­a­clysm was trig­gered short­ly before 8 o’clock on the morn­ing of Decem­ber 26, 2004.  A tremor 12 miles beneath the earth’s sur­face and hun­dreds of miles from that small Indi­an vil­lage struck with the force of 23,000 Hiroshi­ma bombs.  With­in hours, mas­sive waves had engulfed Kudanku­lam, killing scores of vil­lagers and leav­ing many oth­ers homeless.

India’s share of the tsunami’s casu­al­ties was small in rel­a­tive terms – 9,300 dead and 648,000 dis­placed.  In all, the tsuna­mi is esti­mat­ed to have killed 226,000 and injured half a mil­lion, ren­dered 5 mil­lion either home­less or with­out access to food and water, and left one mil­lion peo­ple with­out the means to earn a living.

Ill­ness thrives in such cir­cum­stances.  An addi­tion­al 150,000 peo­ple may have died of infec­tious dis­eases in the weeks and months after the waves reced­ed, prompt­ing my denom­i­na­tion to send a med­ical mis­sion to south­ern India.

My late wife Dawn was part of that mis­sion, pro­vid­ing med­ical care in a makeshift tent to peo­ple in Kudanku­lam and near­by vil­lages.  Their team nev­er num­bered more than five or six, but they served hun­dreds.  As word of their work spread, peo­ple flocked to their tem­po­rary facil­i­ty – some old, some only chil­dren, all strick­en by grief and need­ing com­fort every bit as much as med­ical care.  They found both in that lit­tle tent in that obscure vil­lage where my wife and her col­leagues worked long days and into the night.

Their effort was part of the $7 bil­lion in eco­nom­ic aid that arrived from gov­ern­ments, indi­vid­u­als and relief agen­cies from around the world.  The aid went beyond meet­ing the imme­di­ate needs of food, shel­ter and health care.  It also involved rebuild­ing rav­aged vil­lages, restor­ing van­quished enter­pris­es, and pro­tect­ing against future calamity.

The Wall Street Jour­nal chron­i­cled how the areas hard­est hit by the tsuna­mi are far­ing today. In Kudanku­lam, the fish are more plen­ti­ful, the coast­line is more secure, homes and schools have been rebuilt, and fish­er­men use cell­phones to mon­i­tor the weath­er and avoid storms.

It is a sto­ry that is being repli­cat­ed across the globe in a thou­sand ways. Efforts to reduce pover­ty by address­ing its caus­es and alle­vi­at­ing its con­se­quences are enjoy­ing a lev­el of suc­cess nev­er before seen in world his­to­ry: hunger and dis­ease are in retreat, liv­ing stan­dards and life expectan­cies among the poor­est are improv­ing, eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment and glob­al lit­er­a­cy are on the rise.

Still, pover­ty and dis­ease per­sist, some of it the result of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, much of it the prod­uct of human deprav­i­ty.  Pope Fran­cis used his Christ­mas address to call atten­tion to “the many hearts afflict­ed by war, per­se­cu­tion and slavery.”

It seemed an odd­ly dis­cor­dant mes­sage for a fes­tive sea­son, but it was root­ed in the gospel’s fun­da­men­tal insight into the nature of our souls: we are, all of us, flawed, bro­ken and in need of redemp­tion.  The vio­lence and exploita­tion that we decry in oth­ers are noth­ing more than extreme expres­sions of the very impuls­es that we sub­li­mate, deny and suppress.

Chris­tians call it sin, a uni­ver­sal afflic­tion.  Even the heroes of our faith are sus­cep­ti­ble to it: St. Peter was a cow­ard, King David an adul­ter­er and mur­der­er.  The apos­tle Paul, revered as the great­est Chris­t­ian the­olo­gian and mis­sion­ary, declared him­self the worst of sin­ners.

Sin char­ac­ter­izes the human con­di­tion.  It dis­torts our atti­tudes, strains our rela­tion­ships, warps our per­cep­tion.  Col­lec­tive­ly expressed, it has pro­duced a world marred by con­flict and destruc­tion, vio­lence and exploita­tion, suf­fer­ing and indifference.

But God is not indif­fer­ent.  The gospel draws deri­sion from athe­ists and revul­sion from those in oth­er reli­gious tra­di­tions when it pro­claims that God became a human being, enter­ing into the mess our sin has made that he might rid us of it.  He died to break sin’s shack­les; he rose to free us from its consequences.

In those moments when Chris­tians are most cog­nizant of these truths, we cease to fit the judg­men­tal stereo­type that we have earned and become instead what Pope Fran­cis described as “hum­ble peo­ple, full of hope in the good­ness of God.”

Dawn went to Kudanku­lam full of hope in the good­ness of God.  She returned in the spring of 2005 with sto­ries, pho­tos and rupees that I keep in a sand­wich bag.  She didn’t live to see the hap­py results of her labors.  She suf­fered severe brain injury in a traf­fic acci­dent that fall and died in the sum­mer of 2006.

She died full of hope in the good­ness of a God who will not let death have the last word, who will not rest until all is put right.

The sea­son for Christ­mas car­ols is past, but the joy and hope they express are always in sea­son.  Isaac Watts’ “Joy to the World,” writ­ten near­ly three cen­turies ago, gave voice to that hope:

No more let sin and sor­rows grow,

     nor thorns infest the ground.

He comes to make his bless­ings known

     far as the curse is found.

Sin’s curse is every­where evi­dent – in wars and nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, in polit­i­cal and social dis­cord, in frac­tured rela­tion­ships, in the mor­tal­i­ty of our bod­ies and the tur­moil of our souls.  But God and his bless­ings are big­ger than all of that.  Those bless­ings are evi­dent today in progress against AIDS and malar­ia, in relief from hunger and pover­ty, in restored rela­tion­ships and rec­on­ciled ene­mies, in prayers God answers and souls he redeems, in rebuilt vil­lages and the renew­al of Kudankulam.

Hap­py New Year!