Memo from a paradise on fire

Editor’s note: The following guest column comes from Douglas W. Kmiec, professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. It was written just days after the fires started in Southern California.

Sunday began in its usual way in our town of Malibu, Calif., along the Pacific Ocean -- except oddly there was no power. High winds this time of year in Southern California often knock down power lines, and this proved to be the case again.

What was not expected was that the loose power line would dangerously arc and trigger a massive fire in Malibu Canyon. Within minutes the fire was racing toward the ocean, as if in defiant challenge of the sustaining sea itself.

I relish quiet Sunday mornings. Because I was teaching adult catechism later in the day, it was not surprising for me to think of the battle between fire and water raging outside in religious terms. The furious passion of sin taking on the cleansing and cooling water of baptism, I speculated.

Satan, it seemed, had come to paradise again.

Standing in the way on one side of the canyon road he had chosen was one of the most expensive mansions in the community, perhaps in all the nation -- literally built in the style of a castle upon a majestic hillside. As man’s creations go, it seemed an impenetrable fortification.

It would be lost in minutes.

Next up for the devilish fire lay Pepperdine University, a Christian university situated upon close to a thousand steeply sloping acres overlooking the Pacific. Many students are attracted to Pepperdine by brochures that make higher education in this setting seem more aligned with surfing and leisure than Socrates and serious intellectual effort. The brochures aptly reflect Pepperdine’s campus beauty, but they understate its inner goodness.

I think the wretched old deceiver himself has been fooled. Little did the malevolent blaze realize that just the day before the canyon fire the university community had turned out in great number to consider the social justice of Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh, whose creative microlending helped bring hope to small shopkeepers and craftspeople creating, as the university nicely put it, “the spark of personal initiative and enterprise necessary to pull themselves out of poverty.”

As with most universities, of course, students come to Pepperdine for many reasons -- a highly personal curriculum in the undergraduate school is structured around the great books, placing students in conversation with the authors of the finest literature and learning. The law school where I am privileged to teach has a top-ranked dispute resolution program that strives to remind a culturally litigious society that it is better to forgive and resolve than further stoke dispute.

There are many excellent teachers at the university, but this challenging Sunday, the faculty of greater note would be wearing yellow slickers and helmets and heavy boots. These “visiting faculty” came on red trucks and often from great distances. But they came with only one lesson plan: “Love thy neighbor.”

Miraculously, the firefighters steered the blaze away from thousands of much-relieved students, and thousands more anxious parents watching frightening news reports at a distance.

Of course, like the devil himself, wildfire seldom rests in one place very long.

Monday afternoon, as this is written, the fire is now three miles south of the university on the ridge line above our house. Your columnist is taking a short break from joining his neighbors on rooftops spraying water at an inferno from a garden hose.

A humorous sight? Perhaps. An inconsequential gesture? Hardly.

This devil of a fire is no match for neighbors in mutual aid of one another. Oh yes, it may take one or more of our houses, but in the Latin, “Omnia vincit amor” (“Love conquers all”).

Translated in an e-mail I just received from a colleague who has lost his home, “Our home is a total loss. But God is more than good and we shall rebuild.”

Or as Pope John Paul II reminded us, “In the end, love will be victorious! Let everyone be committed to hastening this victory.”

So, excuse me now, I have a place on the hose line.