On the national news last night I watched a disgruntled citizen in Florida take aim and shoot a gun at members of a school board during a public meeting. On one hand, it was unbelievable. On the other, mindless killing of innocent people by mentally warped individuals who don’t care about their own life, has been on the rise, and alarmingly so.
Suicide bombers in the Middle East are one of the worst case examples of this kind of senseless killing. How can you reason with it? How do you make sense of it? I pondered.
I can’t make sense of it. It’s evil, and evil never makes sense, I decided. But it does need a solution.
I don’t have all the answers, but one thought that occurred to me, after praying for peace about the school board shooting, was that people need to value their lives more and not give into hopelessness.
With the incident in Florida, the killer was a grown man with a wife and family to care for. After the shooting, the wife said that her husband was overwhelmed by the depressed economy and their financial plight. She was a teacher and had lost her job at the hands of this very same school board. Evidently, the husband thought some kind of justice would be served by him murdering the school board. He failed to kill anyone, and when discovered by security, shot himself.
At any rate, one cure for society is to raise citizens who don’t get into such a mental state of despair that they resort to such fatalistic endings.
There is a God. There is help. There is always hope, always a solution somewhere. And there are lots of people who want to help others in trouble too. Patience, humility, courage and persistence find answers.
It’s too easy to become fearful and despondent about the direction our world is going right now with repeated incidences like the above in Florida. But don’t! That is the last thing we should do.
There are plenty of positive things we can do.
We can raise children who know how to turn to God and find the help they need during trial. We can help our neighbor more with encouragement, love and compassion that helps them through the tough spots. We can be examples of how to deal effectively with challenges and overcome them.
Murder and mindless killing should not be seen as a last resort for dealing with a perceived injustice. Life is the solution, not death. And perhaps we all need to cherish it more.
AMEN
I guess I would say Evan that we need to remember that everyone doesn’t grow up in Christian Science Sunday School, or any religious, values environment and simply don’t know how to cope, manage, make “sense” of this mortal material experience. My first thought, especially after 9/11 is to have compassion, put some compassion into the atmosphere. If more of us were loving the planet, fewer people would feel so desperate and cut off from God. Many people I know are coming to the conclusion that everyone is always operating at their highest sense of right. If they “knew” how to do better they would. Material thought, mortal mind, is handling most of us on this planet. Maybe it’s only the Christian Scientists who know how to deal with it? So, I’ll just keep trying to bless everyone, feel compassion for people who are in such pain, they don’t value life. Since I’ve dealt with those feelings myself (I also didn’t grow up in C.S. Sunday School) I know what I’m talking about.
Sancy
Hi Sancy,
Oh, I think you are most certainly right! They do need compassion, help, support, inspiration to see their way out of discouragement, disappointment, anger and whatever else drives them to such extremes. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” We all have a responsibility to help our fellow being.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Evan and Sancy for your comments and for bringing this subject up. I think this would be a great discussion at our Church Alive Summit in Australia next year. We as Christian Scientists really need to know and pray about how we can get this message out into our communities. This message of hope and inspiration, which we have learned through the study of CS – especially when times are tough, but even when they are not. Thanks again….Janet
Just a footnote, I think the gift that MBE’s writings gave us was the ability to use Truth to correct in our own thought what “seems” to be awry “out there” in the world, whether it’s physical challenges in our body, severe weather, terrorism, world financial meltdown, whatever. We get to deny reality in our own thought rather than wring our hands at what “other people” are doing and feel burdened with correcting them. We know if God didn’t make it, it isn’t real. So, why “stand aghast at nothingness?”
Sancy
Why is it that we are all troubled by the mindless killing of humans but are unrepentant about the equally senseless killings that we promote and perpetuate every time we purchase the dead bodies of innocent animals?
How do we hope to solve the first problem if we continue to participate in the latter one and pretend it is not equally immoral?
Thousands of years of social pressure, convention, tradition, habit, and an addiction to flesh have trained us to believe that Homo sapiens and other species are unalike, but a humble reading of inspired scripture reminds us that every creature who lives and moves and has his being in God deserves to be loved, respected, valued, cared for, protected from all harm.
I’m not going off on a tangent; rather, I’m suggesting that we cannot continue to commit wrongdoing just because it is culturally acceptable, then hope to eradicate the same evil when it’s done to us.
Our innate compassion should NEVER be limited by species. Nor should our inherent desire to be honest and fair EVER be suppressed by society.
It’s time for all of us to actively apply our spiritual understanding of divine Love in every little and big way, with meekness and no condemnation of others, if we hope to help the world stop the cycle of death and destruction.
Thank you so much for letting me speak from my heart on behalf of all hearts who belong to the great heart of infinite Love.
I have to say I find these words by “anonymous” very compelling… We are so quick to be outraged at the violence of others mindlessly killing human beings, and yet we ourselves are mindlessly killing beings whose lives are to them just as significant and precious to them as mine is to me.
The unnecessary killing of animals for food is mindless and evil, and yet because it is culturally mandated and approved, we don’t question it, and instead of taking the beam out of our own eye, we point out the one in others.
I believe the routine killing of animals for food is the underlying desensitizing violence that creates the mentality of violence we see played out around us. As MBE emphasized, we are called to practice mercy and goodness – this is essential to prayer – and yet from the point of view of the animals we pay others to mutilate, hyperconfine, and kill for habit and pleasure, we are nothing more than merciless terrorists, engaging in behavior that we have been programmed from infancy to engage in.
What I love about C.S. is its insistence on questioning the prevailing paradigms and attitudes of benighted culture and mortal mind. Thanks to everyone who is moving compassion to all life forward, and contributing to the real healing of our world. We are needlessly killing 75 million animals every day in the U.S. for food, and we don’t even give these precious ideas of God any respect or consideration as they drown in rivers of blood at our hands.
I hope we wake up to the truth of Love, Spirit, Life, and the sacred preciousness of all life soon! Each one of us can, as the spiritual teachers urge us, be the change we want to see in the world. We can stop mumbling excuses and throw off the old chains, and walk upright with kindness and mercy radiating from us rather than fear and death. We cannot build a tower of love with bricks of cruelty and denial.
Thank you for opening your heart to the animals, starving people, slaughterhouse workers, wildlife, and ecosystems needlessly harmed by our culture’s ingrained habits, and bringing your life into alignment with your values.