When tragedy strikes
- deansimpson7
- Jun 13
- 2 min read
BY BARRY GITTINS
King Solomon suggested in Ecclesiastes (3:1 and 4) that there was a season for everything “and a time for every matter under heaven … a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance”.
St Paul later upped the ante, teaching people to “be happy with those who are happy, and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15).
We love to celebrate, to laugh; understandably, we cherish the good times. Sadly, life also gives us numerous opportunities to practise the Apostle Paul’s words of weeping with those who weep.
Later this year, it will be 59 years since a fire killed 30 men sleeping in The Salvation Army’s William Booth Memorial Men’s Hostel, then located at 462 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.
The 1966 conflagration, described by The Age as “Australia’s deadliest single building fire”, started from “a single stray cigarette”. More than 150 people escaped the blaze.
The bodies of 15 of the 30 victims were unclaimed by any relatives or friends.
Fifty years ago this month, in May 1975, the War Cry recorded that seven men died in the People’s Palace attached to the original Adelaide Congress Hall buildings one night the previous month.
“The Salvation Army expresses profound sympathy to all the bereaved relatives and to all who have suffered in any way,” the War Cry reported.
The brothers Gibb, better known as the Bee Gees, recorded a plaintive song in 1979 about pain and desolation: “Tragedy, When the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on, it’s tragedy. When the morning cries and you don’t know why, it’s hard to bear with no one to love you, you’re goin’ nowhere.”
In times of deep, gripping loss, in the ashes of efforts to help others, The Salvation Army mourned with those who mourned. Salvationists do so still.
