Everything we do is part of a vast chain of events. Sometimes things work out to our advantage. Sometimes not. There are no guarantees. While we might want to minimize suffering and give our children a better world, the outcome of all our efforts is at best uncertain. We might long for stability, peace, and a fair share of the planet’s bounty, but the history of humanity has demonstrated that life has often been unstable, contentious, and pretty much unfair.
Historically speaking, the words of Thoreau ring true, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Humanity has had some good runs, but overall, the few who have the most have been awfully good at making sure they can get more while the rest continue to struggle. When Jesus said, “The poor will always be with you,” it seems to me he might have been thinking that poverty is not a bug but a feature of the system we have designed. Maybe we want life to be the way it’s always been more than we want to fix it. Maybe we don’t really want life to get better, because it seems every time things start to improve, some subset of our species comes along to put a stop to that.
Some believe the myth of progress. However, when things change, they do not necessarily get better. Sometimes things get a lot worse before they even return to “normal.” And in the course of human events, many positive steps can be undone by a few negative steps. Perhaps the quiet desperation Thoreau saw has something to do with the feeling that most of us can never quite make progress.
Lately, some Christians have attacked the virtue of empathy. Apparently, it’s toxic, or a sin, or dangerous, or a weakness, or at least not the way to achieve their political goals. To be sure, any good thing can be corrupted. I know this from personal experience. Yet, I am willing to risk my soul to too much empathy rather than not enough. In the past, Christians were cautioned about empathy – during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, chattel slavery, the Jim Crow era, the Holocaust, and anytime empathy might have stood in the way of what some believed “must be done.” Could empathy be a sin only when some want to justify their callousness?
Many years ago, I gave some demonstrations of the university recording studio for elementary school classes. Half the kids would sing while the other half watched and listened. One day, a little boy quietly climbed up on my lap as I showed the kids how the mixing console worked. At first, I didn’t know what to do. Then I remembered: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matthew 19:4) So, I continued with the demonstration as if nothing was out-of-the-ordinary. Later, the teacher told me she was as surprised as I was. She had been counselling the boy about appropriate and inappropriate behavior, but she told me she suspected he didn’t get much affection at home. Maybe he sensed I was a dad. Maybe he trusted me. I don’t know. All I can hope is that he felt safe for a few minutes.
We are living through a time when what we thought were established constitutional and ethical principles are being demolished. It looks like more and more people will end up on their own, as most of the population was throughout human history. Much of the “progress” of the twentieth century seems to be unraveling in the twenty-first. Conspiracy theories and unfounded beliefs threaten to make life worse for millions. The US seems to be transitioning away from being a strong, reliable ally to a second-rate isolationist oligarchy. A substantial portion of the US seems to take pleasure in causing chaos and suffering. Most of us claim to be pro-life, but our leaders’ compulsion to personal power and retribution threatens to make the world less safe for us and our children. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 89 Seconds before Midnight, the closest it has ever been. I don’t know how to react to what I’ve been seeing and reading.
As children we were taught to expect certain events to follow others. Do good and expect (mostly) good in return. Do evil and suffer the consequences. Like the old children’s stories and songs, most of us believed our lives would unfold in predictable ways. Love-marriage-children-work-retirement-heaven. Yet, many people don’t go through life like “The Farmer in the Dell.” There are parts of the world where it takes superhuman effort just to survive, where pain and death occur so often that childhood dreams hardly have a chance. But let’s review the standard sequence of events:
The farmer takes a wife – The wife takes a child – The child takes a nurse – The nurse takes a cow – The cow takes a dog – The dog takes a cat – The cat takes a rat – The rat takes the cheese.
And in the end, The cheese stands alone. Maybe this was a warning. Considering the direction we are going; our country might stand alone before long. And so might each of us. Unless we work together to build a better world and avoid destroying the world we’ve been given. As always, the future is uncertain.
MurrayWorks 