“Madeleine L’Engle keenly observes in her book, A Stone for a Pillow, that our English word ‘disaster’ comes from the roots dis- (meaning ‘separation’) and -aster (meaning ‘star’).  Disaster is thus a separation from the stars, a fragmenting of creation, the shattering of what God formed  as an interconnected whole.”

(As quoted in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison, p. 100)

By the way, Slow Church may be the best book I’ve ever read on the nature of the church.