Thoughts 8.16.21
How are we meant to respond? How are we meant to properly react? What does it look like to embrace the events 7,698 miles away from where I sit in front of my digital display and somehow muster up the perfect stoic-meets-hopeful response to the depravity of those hardly earning the title “human”? How are we meant to view these beasts? Yet, even more so, how are we supposed to trust? Trust in the all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful creator while the world is seemingly falling apart. If I am honest with you, my temptation is to see it, boil it down into a few semi-informed, yet platitudinal phrases to sprinkle into the next conversation I am a part of when it comes up. I am tempted to post the same photo I have seen a hundred times or the update from a person I have never met. I am tempted to believe I can understand. Tempted to convince myself of my ability to comprehend and through my comprehension… I am tempted to rise above. To look down upon, to despise and belittle and elevate my superior morality and goodness. It is so easy to… elevate myself, in the face of utter and certain evil. If I am being completely honest, it is pretty easy to elevate myself in comparison to even the small injustices I heroically witness and judge every day, let alone these massive horrific circumstances and atrocities committed by faceless villains across the globe. These faceless people, these nameless tragedies, these forgotten victims. It is so easy in the comfort of my apartment to judge and through my judgment bring about my own elevation into a space pseudo-self-salvation. However, I am by no means attempting to justify these acts, to pacify the destruction. I am simply wrestling with the response. Sitting here as I pen these words my only inclination is to feel it. I am afraid of our access to information without access to the connected experience is quickly dulling our ability to feel. This week alone there are enough world events of epic maleficence I can hardly decide which one to read about. My true temptation is to protect myself from the pain. To insulate myself into a well-rounded safe understanding. It is in this moment of temptation I find we are equally swiftly incapable of earning the title “human”. We must feel it, we must challenge and call up those closest to us into empathy and feeling. Do what we can, yes act. But in my opinion, feel. Sit with the depravity capable of inanimate forces, and even worse the fully conscious and sentient minds, who for some God-forsaken reason believe the chaos and destruction flowing from their hands is righteous and up-worthy. We must feel it. We must allow our feelings to guide us into empathy and by the power of our empathy, compel us into action. Yes in the headline moments, but also in the small injustices we witness and allow ourselves to justify our built-up numbness to. My challenge for you and more so my challenge for me today is this: thaw out the aspects of our beating hearts we have allowed to grow calluses over. Open up the soft depths of your being to feel for the humanity at stake. I love the passage from Donne,
”No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
The bells are tolling friends… humanity is at stake these dark days… not only across the world but in the hearts of you and me.