picture in my mind

I started reading Arundhati Roy's award-winning The God of Small Things, and came across a passage that made my heart stop; I have no words for how dismal it made me feel.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cosy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people's eyes and became an exasperating expression.

I believe my God is of big things as well as of small things. And whatever perceived personal misfortunes I encounter in my brief life, is actually of benefit to me, though I may not know it, and wholly intended by God. Not as collateral damage, or at the expense of big things. We do have a right to mourn personal tragedies -- because none of us is inconsequential. But as long as we keep it all in perspective? Everything has its rightful place, eh?