There are certainly positive examples in the news of daring rescues, heroic efforts and charitable contributions, but it doesn't take very many examples of human depravity to wonder just what it is that we are made of. The Psalmist looks at the heavens, the work of God's fingers, the moon and the stars that God has established, and wonders aloud, "what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor" (Psalm 8).
But then I read the Associated Press story of the Pennsylvania mother who pleaded guilty this week to swinging her 4-week old son like a bat to hit her boyfriend during a fight -- and fracturing the baby's skull in the process -- and then the Associated Press story of the Indiana man who crashed his rented plane into the home of his ex-mother-in-law, killing himself and his 8-year-old daughter, and feel myself begging the question, "Just how much lower than God have we really been made?"
How much lower? Whether we are terrorists or defenders, murderers or jurors, disgruntled fathers or angry mothers, the value of life has slipped so far that, if a traded commodity, it would be dropped from NASDAQ as junk status. What would it mean to recover a glimpse of the Holy in those we live with or pass on the street? What would it change if we valued each other as highly as our cell phones and iPods? What would it feel like for tears to flow as freely over the loss of another human as they do over the loss of data in a crashed hard drive or glitched PDA?
At the very least I think it would mean using wood, once again, for baseball bats...
...instead of children.
1 comment:
How much lower can we go? A question I have pondered all week. We find ourselves disappointed and can't find an appropriate resonse, so we strike out. I just read a wonderful metaphor about understanding the large questions. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke described something called the "Beginner's Mind". He said " Be patient to all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Resolve to be always beginning- to be a beginner!"
My questions are beginner's questions and as long as there is interest in asking the questions, I pray I will have the energy and patience to live into the answers.
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