Hell(s) On Earth

Just two mornings ago, I sat at breakfast with Middle Daughter while she explained -- in what passes as "detail" to the teen mind -- her plans to take a year off after high school and travel the world with a friend, stopping in various countries to do volunteer work.

While I applauded her senses of responsibility and adventure, I begged her to think seriously about taking the year off during college, when she's older and will have had a little more experience away from home.

Of course, what I was really thinking was how much better I'd sleep at night if she were tucked away safely in some dorm on a bucolic college campus.

As of yesterday, there ain't no such thing.

Some who believe in Hell think there's a special antechamber for mass murderers.

I suppose they're consoling themselves by thinking the Universe will pass judgment on behalf of the innocent victims. They want to believe that the evil will suffer after death. Too many evil people are beyond our reach by the time we've discovered or stopped them.

I don't believe in Hell.

But sometimes I think there are lots of little hells, right here among the living. They spring up in our midst. They take many forms: an irresponsible government, a toxic environment, a war without end, a family whose members are at each other's throats. All too often, they involve wholesale slaughter of the innocent.

We have no choice but to live through these hells, and no responsibility more solemn than to prevent them. Or, finding ourselves in their midst, to fight them.

We have a lot of work to do.

--T.A.

Comments

[TikkunGer]

Hi David

Last night as I was drifting off to sleep I was struck by what I suppose could be called a micro moment of dread. Events like the one which took place in Virginia yesterday have a powerful way of pulling the rug from under me. It's easy living in Canada to delude oneself into thinking that " here everything is safe" and that " horrible things" only happen other places but this is far from the truth.

Every student and faculty member who went through that ordeal yesterday woke up I'm sure pretty much the same way I did. Thinking today was going to be another day. Some people excited and others dreading it but none of them expecting to find themselves, in the middle of a battles own any time soon.

It's baffling to me how we take things for granted and assume there's always more time to fix things, to grow or to simply be. It also scares me that one person can become so ill that their disease spills out in a way that can cause so much destruction. In a way that within a few hours 30 plus lives come to an end. That the lives of hundreds of other people including families, friends and those simply unfortunate enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, are also dramatically impacted in an almost unimaginable fashion.

Maybe I'm just in the grips of a narcissistic Buddhist hangover but situations like this one make me realize how much I take for granted and how unappreciative I can be much of the time.

Anyhow I seem to a fallen into a rant, so my apologies.

[karen]

That was ~thought~, i think- as opposed to rant. Honest thought.

David- are we made to go ~Home~? To Heaven? To our Father? If so- the one thing that would cause us greatest pain(IMhumbleO)is the separation from Him- forever.

That's hell, no matter where it is.

During ~the~ Tsunami & Katrina so much seemed hellish. except that- throughtout these horrific tradgedies, hundreds upon hundreds of miracles were happening. Hope in the midst of hell. Coming from e/other.

I don't think i can wrap my pea-brain around the loss @ such a grand looking place as the college of VT: how one person destroyed so many. How do we fight that?