Sabbath Messages > Sabbath Message: July 9, 2005
Good Sabbath
July 9, 2005
I have very mixed emotions today, reading all accounts of the London bombings and celebrating Fran's and my 55th wedding anniversary. The years fly by, one day at a time. Growing into maturity is a full-time job, accelerated by marriage. You learn about your own nature while observing hers. Your marriage evolves moment-by-moment, hand in hand with the one you think you love, learn to like, then know you love because you've found wisdom and you know what love is, a commandment that neutralizes your human nature.
"Fate is the ruler, but the servant of Providence." (Bulwer)
If this is true than God is the co-conspirator against which we find no defense. Is that possible from a kind God?
But then Bulwer writes: "Thought presides over all; Fate, that dead phantom, shall vanish from action and providence alone be visible in heaven and on earth." Then adding: "Fate! There is no fate; between the thought and the success, God is the only agent."
And out of Job: "Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."
Yet modern religion--just as ancient vintages--is filled with hatred rather than understanding, intolerance rather than love, and slaughter rather than justice. Is there ever justice in slaughter? How could that be if the greatest who have ever lived preach and teach love and forgiveness. Does a wolf forgive before his fangs are in a lamb? Does a zealot forgive before he detonates his bomb? Can you love a god so much that you murder in his name? Can religion be based upon human nature? Did God invent Pogo or did Pogo invent God?
Fran and I were invited to the celebration of the new "Green-line" trolley, connecting San Diego State University with the balance of the trolley system. As we rode the sparkling new coach, I thought about London and what were peoples' thoughts as they rode to their destinies. After all, this wasn't a concentration camp where you knew that evil was the conductor. This was to become everyday commute for thousands of college students, baseball fans, shoppers and the curious.
We were born to be innocent, not suspicious of each other. Could that be true when history has taught us to be suspicious and explicit media supplies the script of where and how evil is born--in the minds and souls of the amoral and the devilish.
The following represents comments and columns from Subway riders in NYC: " We are a soft target....but I thought this was over after 9/11. It's a kind of danger I'm going to live with...When I come to think of it, I don't feel very safe any more, but then, on a day-to-day basis, I feel fine...It's only a matter of time before something happens."
And from Ian McEwan and Tom Friedman and myself: The world leaders realize, at last, that there is no protection from assassins, for their target is the human spirit, not the body. The body count is for media; fear is for every other human mind and that is what the devils have sought to message to the world and have now succeeded. "Once we have counted up our dead and the numbness turns to anger and grief, we will see that our lives will be difficult. We have been savagely woken from a pleasant dream...how much freedom will we be asked to trade for our security."
"This is deeply troubling because open societies depend upon trust, trusting that the stranger next to you is not wearing dynamite...the Al Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. ...to this day, no major Muslim cleric or religious body has ever issued a fatwa condemning bin Laden."
From a letter to the editor in yesterday's NY Times: "We American Muslims stand in solidarity with the rest of humanity against all terrorist attacks. We share the solemn responsibility of defending this country in every possible way, from harm of every kind."
Terror outvotes everything else. Politicians win elections by transferring the distant threat to the homeland. The innocent suffer along with the intolerant. There are no winners, only the casual and the growing casualties. Terror erects fear while everything crumbles in its thunder.
"War is deception." (Sun Tzu's Art of War)--but deception has become political theory, practiced each expensive election as we divide each other to provide the devil room to conquer our souls and bodies.
As we review what's in our heart after so deadly a terror, we must return to better thoughts, to a faith in something beside cynicism, for terrorists and charlatans win when they convert faith to either fanaticism or cynicism.
I shall not allow that, for I believe that God created Pogo and that means we must face our souls in our reflections in the mirror; that we cannot allow ourselves to be shut in a prison in which fear places our spirit and minds. We cannot be that, for then we have ceased to be human or humane. We become zombies who exist, waiting for a bomb or disease to strike us down and what would that be? Divinity and nobility are related by human spirit and not by fear of the unknown.
"God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason." (Dag Hammarskjold)
"And he who saves a single person, it is as though he saved the whole world." (Mishnah)
When we care for the safety and life of a single person, then we have learned the pleasure of what a single human means to God. We are not a multitude. There is no safety in numbers. The murder of a single human is as evil as the slaughter of many. We must learn that and prize ourselves that we have at learned this lesson of God and soul.
Think of the good people who outnumber evildoers and make certain that each of us sustains goodness, for only then will terror vanish.
sandy
