"Two Human Stories"

Monday, April 7, 2014

The reflection booklet talks about Willa Cather's quote about there being only two human stories that repeat themselves over and over again.  It doesn't actually say what they are, but the stories today are the woman caught in adultery and Susanna and the old liars.

But it also talks about how who we identify with in the stories changes.  How we are each of the characters in turn.  But I wonder -- how many of us are willing to admit when we are the hypocrites?  Even when we do see their side?

It reminds me of the triangle that I put up in my classroom during the Holocaust Unit.  It places the victims in the center, because (I suppose) it's always just a quirk of fate who ends up the victims.  I don't mean that there are distinct causes and such, I just mean that it could be you or not you.  There's really nothing you can do about that part.  If you are a victim, your choices are victim, quisling, and rebel.

If you are not a victim, if the wheel of fortune lands you higher, then your choices are perpetrator, bystander, and rescuer.  Perhaps the reflection book is right that at times we are both.  I certainly see it play out that way often enough in the stories I devour so voraciously.  But we do have a choice.

Perhaps the grace is in realizing that we need to pose the question.  Perhaps the grace is not so much in the decision (for we know surely what is the right choice) but in having the strength and the self-awareness to ask the question.  To admit that the world is wrong and that someone is doing it.  That we must fight them even at personal cost.

It's so much easier to worry about that speck in our neighbor's eye or even the speck in our own left eye and ignore the beam in our right eye that -- if removed, will show us how cruel the world is and how we are a part of it.  Perhaps that's the real reason we see the speck and not the beam.  Perhaps it's not the kind of judgmental selfishness but simply as self-protective one.

We don't want to ask the question -- we want to stay out of it, if possible.  We want it to go away so we can go back to the matter of our own dreams.  We want the world to be stable and relatively good and helpful to our own agenda.

We don't want to fight it.  We could see reason to fight it everywhere, if we had the courage to look.  If we had the courage to remove the beam in our eye.

And the worst part is: we know that.  That's why we leave it there while we swat at specks of dust.