LET US NOT LOSE FAITH IN GOD OR HUMANITY

After Newtown, most of us have gone back to “business as usual.” Thus, most of us beheld with half-horror, half-complacency, a teenager in Brunswick, Georgia, indiscriminately blowing away a one-year-old in his stroller. It's just become so much “business as usual.”

What do we cry out? That another weapon has fallen into the hands of a beast? That it's the product of a culture bred of anger, violence, and devalued life? That it's just more evidence that evil is a real presence, which we too easily doff off as insanity or culturally-driven malevolence?

Our understandable instinct begs to punish the predator. Hang him. Poison him. Gas him. Fry him. Even those folks who oppose capital punishment start equivocating. I asked Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel about this, and his seemingly not-too-philosophical answer was, “Sometimes it's just different.”

But, immeasurably more elusive are the questions of faith, ones that cannot be whitewashed through sociology and psychology. They are not theological abstractions; they shake even people of belief to the core: Where was God? How does a benevolent God let such bestiality exist? Why a precious, pristine baby? Why?

Are there really answers? After all has been spoken, even a thousand philosophers or theologians cannot explain away the death of one innocent child. The belief that this child now rests peacefully at the throne of the Divine can bring only the vaguest comfort to a grieving mother. Do you mean God is so selfish that He would rather have a blameless baby with Him than with his loving mama?

No satisfactory answers. A test of faith? Possibly the hardest. Yet, most of us do somehow continue to believe, and our faith remains to sustain and comfort us. As Wiesel's rabbi told him after the death camps, “The question is not how I can believe, but how can I not believe.” Faith may be preposterous, but the specter of living without faith allows nothing to make sense. My mother would say more succinctly, “God is a big boy. He knows how to fend for Himself.”

So God is a big boy. In the long run, I don't fear for His derision anywhere nearly so much as I fear losing our own basic faith in humanity – man's capacity to be more than a beast. We face so much damning evidence that believing in the human capacity to “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly” (the prophet Micah's admonition) becomes all but impossible. We need not look back to the Holocaust to witness humanity gone malignant. Holocausts still rage. The conscienceless murder of even one blameless baby is no less than a holocaust in microcosm.

Is there an antidote that we can muster against inhumanity? Yes, there is so much we can still do. And let it be said, not gratuitously, that our own community has a gracious head start, because we are already so distinguished by our compassion, idealism, and generosity.

The answer is not merely an op-ed or “teaching” about altruism. It lies in making compassion and idealism all-pervasive forces that seep out of the pores of a community's life, forces from which you may be able to run, but not hide. Let those forces be made manifest through our faith communities and secularists, our schools, the corporate and non-profit worlds, civic organizations, government, arts, theater, music, and any other vehicles through which people of goodwill unite. Work individually. Form partnerships. Let there be major cross-community programs and projects, really outstanding ones, to celebrate the vision of altruism. Let there be thinkers and resource pools to percolate new, out-of the-box ideas. Let there be massive marketing and PR campaigns – all to cast an omnipresent aura of compassion over our community. The final objective? As my colleague puts it: The power to create. The will to perfect. The ability to dream. The capacity to love.

Would a community buy into such a cockamamie scheme? Would ours? Might we here declare a Year of Altruism?

Keep the name and idea in mind. You will be hearing more.