"We Love To Punish"

“We Love To Punish”

This computer’s storage and Desktop has so many car pictures it’s a marvel anything will process. Time to move stuff to Trash, at least those that are readily available on line. 

Reading at the moment. Actually reading again, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything as I think and explore and start trying to figure out, discern is the spiritual word, things about my life, use of the time I have left, including my ministries after next month. In my life and lifestyle, my vocations shift over time, and actively discerning that shifting is a facet of my -- spirituality. My way has generally been to work through it in the wee hours or just ignore it and let it happen, but this season of change may require some time in Retreat. So, looking into that as a possibility for a few times over coming months. In that my blog postings are journaling of sorts, that’s what this is. Journaling self-reflection.

Boston Bombings are still in mind, and may be so for a long time. The teenager has been transferred to a prison hospital. That he wasn’t given his Miranda before questioning is not important, because it enabled authorities to get essential intelligence: if the judge doesn’t allow the boy’s testimony as evidence in court, there is plenty of material, evidence, witness, to convict. His father is coming over from Russia, loyally, blindly protective. When he visits, we might hope Jahar will tell his dad the truth and not foster the family denials that seem to have driven his mother to the edge of insanity. The media are reporting that his brother’s body is “unclaimed,” which is pitiful, pathetic enough before even considering that the imams may not allow a religious funeral. Funerals are more to comfort the living than to honor the dead, and even the Episcopal Church has burial liturgy for one who is not of the Christian faith. 

To me, loving children, a burning part of the pathos is a frightened teenager hiding in someone’s boat, unarmed, alone, wounded and likely in physical pain, terrified, slowly bleeding out as he listens to the search going on furiously in the neighborhood around him while he waits to be killed or captured, with hours to come to his senses, think for and about himself and realize that he is in his last moments of freedom forever and that in following the wrongful lead of the brother he doted on, he has brought his own life down in ruin. Irretrievably. Before he even had a chance to love and live.

No one could wish this on a beloved son or grandson. Or nephew. 

For the rest of us, the end of all this, probably years out with our slow justice system, will be America’s ultimate moral test: whether to execute a child. And if we do so, whether our nation can face the ages and remain standing, convicted and condemned by the same evil we deplore.

"... and the star spangled banner in ... "

Someone said to me recently that God will punish evil, that God must judge and punish evil because God is just. I pray and deeply hope, that God is not just, but merciful. Else, I myself am in deep kimchi.

Watching the Boston Bombing episode is causing me more moral reflection and introspection than anything else ever in my memory. How can God bring something good out of this evil? Perhaps by self examen, to let it change me in some positive way.

“Why do they hate us so?” was a question that circulated briefly after 9/11. A high prince of Saudi Arabia hinted at answers and was rebuffed. And we have not been interested in the question even to bother considering it. Only to punish. And make them hate us even more.

"... and the star spangled banner in triumph ... "

Kyrie, eleison.

TW+