A Hole In Our Gospel: Chapters 9 & 10 (2 of many)

Imagine (this shouldn't be too hard for any of you) the media and government frenzy resulting from the crash of a passenger jet in the United States, killing all 220 aboard. You've likely been through the experience of observing that situation from afar at least once in your life.

Now imagine a day in which 100 airliners crash, killing 22,000 passengers in a single day. That's a big leap, but not quite out of the realm of imagination. It's the stuff that apocalyptic movies make their money on - the unreal experience of widespread death, destruction and chaos that lies just at the edge of the imaginable.

Finally imagine this catastrophe occurring every single day, each year. This is not the product of some sadistic crack-pot novelist. This is real life - yesterday, today, and tomorrow - for children living in poverty. This is tragedy in its most epic proportions.

That's my synopsis of Richard Stearn's illustration in Chapter 9. The depth of the tragedy is literally incomprehensible. Stearns aptly quotes Flannery O'Connor saying "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." And he also quotes Bono who says (his emphasis): "Fifteen thousand people dying needlessly every day from AIDS, TB, and malaria... This is Africa's crisis. That it's not on the nightly news, that we do not treat this as an emergency - that's our crisis."

Stearns goes on to ask: "So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of 100 planes filled with children crashing daily never reaches our ears? Perhaps one reason is that these kids who are dying are not our kids; they're somebody else's."

He doesn't point an accusatory finger, in fact he owns up to his own inability to cope with the overwhelming statistics, admitting that it takes only a few weeks for himself to become numb to the problem after returning from the depths of poverty in Africa. In Chapter 10 he explains the difficulty of these overwhelming statistics:

... that very statistic, so critical to our understanding of the extent and urgency fo the plight of the world's children, also begins to obscure the humanity, the dignity, and the worth of each of those children. It takes away their names, and their stories, homogenizes their personalities, and cheapens the value of each individual child, created in the very image of God. Statistics can become... just one more way to walk by on the other side of the road.

Stearns references a university study which performed behavioral experiments showing that the story of one child was more compelling than the suffering of millions, asking "Was it not this flaw in our human character that allowed the holocaust and the Rwanda genocide to occur?"

I too feel deeply flawed in my inability to care for the nameless millions suffering on this earth. I may not be able to accomplish much on my own, but I will accomplish absolutely nothing if I don't let this truth form my beliefs and behaviors.