Why?

This is what the sky looks like today, with intermittent showers. Wouldn't you think that that "looks" cold? It's 84 degrees.

As I am procrastinating from vacuuming up all the pets' hair and debris on the carpets, here I am looking at blogs. . . . I was struck by Jan at Happening Here posting quotes from an older book of Desmond Tutu, which describes how I wish Americans would feel about killing other peoples, that any number is unacceptable:

"Our country is on the brink of disaster. Many of us have had to anesthetize ourselves to the agony and suffering of our fellow South Africans. Many of us have had to invoke the kind of defense mechanism that had to see us, we hoped, through this horrendous period of carnage and bloodletting. We had reached dangerous levels when many of us would sigh with relief and say 'Oh, it's only five,' or 'It's only six or seven people who have been killed. Thank goodness.' Only! That is so utterly unacceptable ... Those five or six or seven or eight or ten, hey, that was someone's husband, father, son. That was somebody's brother, somebody's sister, mother. ..."

Jan posted more of this piece of writing about South Africans fighting against each other. Go there to read more.

Why do we accept the numbers being killed and hurt? Why do we ignore the numbers of people starving and being mistreated? Why? Why?

In the introduction of Maggie Ross' book Pillars of Flame, I was struck by her quoting what "Robert Oppenheimer remembered from the Bhagavad Gita, after the first [atomic] bomb explosion: 'I am become Death/ The destroyer of worlds'" (xliii).

Maggie Ross writes, "Always reluctant to mirror the God whose power is expressed through the wisdom of self-restraint, we now appear to have rejected self-restraint as either impossible or undesirable. There seems to be a direct relationship between the rise of technology and the decline of wisdom" (xlix).

Then she quotes Ursula K. Le Guin in The Farthest Shore:
"'. . . .Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. . . .When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed'" (lii).

I've been reading so much about cosmology and theology lately that I am seeing how interconnected all of creation (including the cosmos) everything is. Violence and love have far-reaching effects that we know little about. I am reminded of Evelyn Underhill's description of an act of love being like a pebble thrown into a pond that reverberates on and on to all shores. I think Evelyn also wrote that an act of unkindness shrinks the pond from all edges.

I have no answers, only questions and fears. But here's another quote from Maggie Ross:
"Faith is the security to risk going forward in insecurity. . . ." (lvi)

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And to further question yourself, as I am questioning myself, go and read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. LeGuin. This a disturbingly beautiful story that my daughter AE posted on her blog.