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We are in a hectic effort to save our earth from total destruction. Covid has warned us loud and clear that we are destroying it.
All round us we observe those who care, and those who don't care. Things do look dire. I am not scholar enough to enter that particular fray, but there is one aspect of it all I would like to state. Everyone is doing their best. Her best his best. All the time.
We recognise within our individual countries and even locales that people are doing bad things and others good things.
There are robbers and cheaters and killers and rapists and torturers and tyrants and child-abusers and water-polluters and air-polluters and heartless wealth-hunters and cruel political power-mongers and a dozen other types of person-destroyers.
So how can I glibly proclaim that everyone is doing her his best?
But first I need to say why I take such a stance.
We understandably tend to judge decisions that hurt people, and to judge the perpetrators of such decisions as evil. I've just listed some of the more obvious ones.
I want to say that when people make decisions to hurt they are themselves making choices that they cannot resist.
The soldier who was ordered to hang unto death the Jewish children in his Nazi jail found that he had to jerk their ankles to make their necks break after hanging, one by one. Cruel? O yes, but if he disobeyed he would have himself been hanged for disobedience, and he had a wife and children. Options?
We are psychologically unable to make choices that we do not see to be in our best interests. When you encounter that idea first, you reject it. A little thought, however, will reveal its truth.
(Am I saying then that essentially there is no such thing as sin? I am not even entering that field, at all.)
Evil is a reality. And people have constructs to protect ourselves from the results of such evil. Those very constructs vary from place to place, for all sorts of reasons. They fall within the prescriptions of law.
All I am focusing on is the recognition that although socially we need various measures to protect us from the harmful decisions that damage us, decisions are themselves made by people for whom this is the best they can manage.
In that context it was fascinating for me to find that many judges in the legal sphere go for in-depth spirituality towards the end of their lives because they understand that they have been compelled by law to punish when in fact the 'criminal' had no viable options but to do what she/he did.
This script attempts to fit among reflections about new life.
In this one I am hoping that I might be less condemnatory about women and men who do indeed terrible things; that I might recognise that my own decisions in less-than-creditable situations were at that moment the best I could manage, even though I had to pay a legal/social price later for that choice; and that I might be more easily able to recognise that there simply cannot be a hell, or a purgatory, or any other nonmaterial punishment for our cruelties and stupidities.
We have invented them, and now I at least – as in these lines – must do my best to delete such judgments from my language and attitudes. God bless.
Brendan MacCarthaigh is a Christian Brother from Dublin working in India for over 50 years, mostly in Value Education with senior classes and teachers.
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