A couple of weeks ago, we asked where our brief journey on this earth might be taking us. The local news and a couple of pertinent personal experiences make me realize it’s time to get a little more blunt.
Nearly a decade ago, I was tasked to do something I never contemplated doing: serving as county coroner. The reason? The gentleman who’d served in that position for over 20 years, as the saying goes, “got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.”
We like these cute, innocuous terms, don’t we? As if something’s a childish, harmless prank. The facts: He stole someone’s hardearned money. Why bring that up now? Because two people at the center of our community all their lives did the same thing, just on a bigger scale.
It was despicable and disgusting. It destroyed their and their families’ lives, and I would offer that it besmirched us all as a community. That’s what happens when we live in a community, nation and a society which purports to value ethics, honesty, truth and mutual respect.
I’ve mentioned morality, ethics, respect, trust and commitment in this column n u m e r - ous times. They're just words unless we live them. And we can’t live them if we chuckle or smirk at acts that minimize or diminish our fellow human beings or this irreplaceable creation we so briefly have the privilege and responsibility of journeying through. But that’s what we’re doing, and to coin a phrase, I’m mad as hell about it.
We collectively are consciously embracing a spasming moral vacuousness, which makes me think of an animal on the slaughtering floor in its death throes. Too much? Unfortunately not. We diminish and devalue love, truth, honesty and, most disgustingly, real faith, thumbing our noses at our fellow human beings’ deaths, misery and destitution.
We grasp greedily at every shiny thing dangled in front of us, whoever it belongs to, and news flash … it belongs to the “man upstairs,” not to any of us. We’re just passing through. We spray vile language or laugh at others who repeatedly do so. We ignore, diminish and defile this beautiful home God has given us to be conscientious caretakers of. And by doing this, we defile Him.
We have always struggled as His children to blindly and fearfully feel past our finitude. As I noted two weeks ago, we climb into our little hamster wheels of pointless greed, envy, hate and fear and frenetically struggle to mold our pitiful mausoleums of gold-sprayed sand, while creating insipid myths to somehow swell ourselves by diminishing and defiling our fellow brothers and sisters.
It’s useless, pitiful and, yes, disgustingly immoral. We are here on an extremely brief journey. It’s up to all of us to determine our destination. Let us respect, trust, learn from, commit to, serve and, yes, love all our brothers and sisters and His irreplaceable creation while we’re here. We are pilgrims on a journey; let us focus on journeying well in our brief time here under the beautiful River Tree.
