As the Macondo oil spill haunts the gulf coast of America, one man proposes a giant sand bar that would keep the pollution away from shore and protect sensitive environments like wetlands, beaches and casinos. Dredging, I understand, could begin in 10 days.
It may be a workable solution, a good idea. It may help minimize the impact of a significant environmental disaster. And it is the perfect human reaction.
When faced with any calamity, with any hard problem, we build a fence. We build a wall, a border, a defense. It is the predictable and inevitable jerk of the knee final resort to any of the real or scary bogeymen that inhabit the universe. Build a fence.
Crime? Add a security system. Computer predator? Get a network firewall. Immigration problems? Build a border fence. Protect what we have. Protect us. From them.
This is the thinking, the acting, that makes us human. And this is what condemns us to the lives we live.
It was St. Agustine who coined the phrase incurvatus in se – curved in on ourselves – to describe the state of living in sin. Our brokenness is this intransigence for defining life by how the world affects me, hurts me, harms me, scares me. That “how this affects me” is the smallest part of any problem in the world is of no concern. It is, from beginning to end, all we consider, all we see.
Never mind that this is what inflames the madness of our world. Never mind that the denial of our own culpability in the problems that trouble us condemns us to suffer them again and again. Never mind that seeing our own needs and not our own truth is our daily and final death.
No, just build another fence.
Or maybe there is another way.
Faith calls us to a powerful and new vision of life that reaches beyond fences to causes, to the root issues and needs and solutions that make the world out there less threatening, less harmful. Faith turns our attention from self to other, from today to tomorrow, from what is to what might be. Faith sees blessings not as treasures to be protected but gifts to use to transform the world and every life in it.
Faith turns us back to a God who breaks free from the tomb and invites us on the same path.
You see, the problem is that there is no fence high enough or wide enough or strong enough to protect us from all that threatens us. There is no border fence that will keep out every immigrant who want to, who needs to come in. There is no structure that can keep every drop of oil off from coast or wildlife, either this spill or the next one. There is no alarm system that can’t be beaten by a determined thief, no computer software sophisticated enough to keep your identity sacrosanct if someone really wants it.
But there are ways to be safer. There are ways to reduce poverty and corruption in neighboring governments. There are ways to not need more oil. There are ways to create jobs and futures and optimism in American cities. Oh, they are harder, higher, difficult, but there are ways.
There are ways, but they require skills and dreams other than building fences.
They require faith. They require the courage and hopefulness to look outside of our own very small needs and face the larger and more wonderful possibilities of the world around us.
They requires us to know that we are not the world but we are in it.
Shall we seek these ways, or shall we just build another fence?
It may be a workable solution, a good idea. It may help minimize the impact of a significant environmental disaster. And it is the perfect human reaction.
When faced with any calamity, with any hard problem, we build a fence. We build a wall, a border, a defense. It is the predictable and inevitable jerk of the knee final resort to any of the real or scary bogeymen that inhabit the universe. Build a fence.
Crime? Add a security system. Computer predator? Get a network firewall. Immigration problems? Build a border fence. Protect what we have. Protect us. From them.
This is the thinking, the acting, that makes us human. And this is what condemns us to the lives we live.
It was St. Agustine who coined the phrase incurvatus in se – curved in on ourselves – to describe the state of living in sin. Our brokenness is this intransigence for defining life by how the world affects me, hurts me, harms me, scares me. That “how this affects me” is the smallest part of any problem in the world is of no concern. It is, from beginning to end, all we consider, all we see.
Never mind that this is what inflames the madness of our world. Never mind that the denial of our own culpability in the problems that trouble us condemns us to suffer them again and again. Never mind that seeing our own needs and not our own truth is our daily and final death.
No, just build another fence.
Or maybe there is another way.
Faith calls us to a powerful and new vision of life that reaches beyond fences to causes, to the root issues and needs and solutions that make the world out there less threatening, less harmful. Faith turns our attention from self to other, from today to tomorrow, from what is to what might be. Faith sees blessings not as treasures to be protected but gifts to use to transform the world and every life in it.
Faith turns us back to a God who breaks free from the tomb and invites us on the same path.
You see, the problem is that there is no fence high enough or wide enough or strong enough to protect us from all that threatens us. There is no border fence that will keep out every immigrant who want to, who needs to come in. There is no structure that can keep every drop of oil off from coast or wildlife, either this spill or the next one. There is no alarm system that can’t be beaten by a determined thief, no computer software sophisticated enough to keep your identity sacrosanct if someone really wants it.
But there are ways to be safer. There are ways to reduce poverty and corruption in neighboring governments. There are ways to not need more oil. There are ways to create jobs and futures and optimism in American cities. Oh, they are harder, higher, difficult, but there are ways.
There are ways, but they require skills and dreams other than building fences.
They require faith. They require the courage and hopefulness to look outside of our own very small needs and face the larger and more wonderful possibilities of the world around us.
They requires us to know that we are not the world but we are in it.
Shall we seek these ways, or shall we just build another fence?
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