Delivering the Sunday, Jan. 24 sermon at Second Presbyterian Church in downtown Richmond, Douglas A. Hicks took listeners on an historic and spiritual journey of reflection and moral imagination. The associate professor of leadership studies and religion at the University of Richmond cited St. Paul, Adam Smith and Voltaire and told how Voltaire was influenced by one of the defining events in European history and of the day: November 1, 1755.
One of the largest earthquakes on record leveled Lisbon, Portugal’s capital, that day. Hicks said: “The horror shook the cultured world of Europe€”and influenced many of the Enlightenment philosophers€”Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Smith. No one more was more affected than Voltaire. His "Poem on the Lisbon Disaster" was his rejection of the popular view of Enlightenment optimism, which had suggested that we live in the "best of all possible worlds." Voltaire retorted that the best world would not be littered with bodies. Bodies from an earthquake. His poem begins:
Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, "All's well,"
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts€”
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
Hicks went onto the say: “We have seen too many bodies. They were piled up on the streets of Port-au-Prince. … The body count will also never be known for sure, but the Haitian government stated yesterday that 150,000 have been buried already. The range of the overall death toll is 100,000 to 200,000. That latter figure is of special significance to us here, downtown. 200,000 is the population of the City of Richmond. Do we dare even think about it this way? … Every body, every person populating the City€”from the University of Richmond on the West to the East End€”from Ginter Park on the North across the River and past Manchester and Westover Hills to the South.
“Yes, this is a gruesome act of our moral imagination. Adam Smith would commend this thought exercise to us, because it brings home€”literally home€”for us the scale of the suffering. … Our metropolitan area is not as large as Port-au-Prince, of course, but we can imagine losing more than a hundred thousand of our members. Or maybe we cannot imagine it. … These past two weeks compel us to reflect on the body of Christ.” The complete sermon
