A comment on my earlier post about thinking of ourselves as good people made me realize that I completely ignored an important issue. That is simply this, one of the reasons it is so important to believe we are "a good person' when bad things happen to us is that we don't want to feel we are being punished. And this for the obvious reason that no one wants to feel we are being punished.
I hate it. Even when I knew I was guilty and only got the punishment that I knew ahead of time went with the offense, I have always resented being punished. Obviously, it is not good to think of bad things that happen to us as punishments.
Of course that means we shouldn't treat bad things that happen to bad people as punishments either. Bad things happen to everyone and there is always the possibility that something really bad might happen to me. The rain falls on the good as well as the evil.
This is an old issue and I have nothing new to add to it except for this tangential issue: one of the odd things about the modern world is that as we get more and more secure, we have gotten more and more upset about the problem of evil. A century ago when the average life expectancy was about forty, when many children and their mothers died in childbirth, when diseases like Spanish flu could wipe out millions of people, we all took disease, death and suffering as unavoidable in our lives. We have become less tolerant of "evil" as there is less of it in our lives.
People who lived with far more evil than we will probably ever face were less bothered by the problem of evil than we are. Somewhere along the line we seem to have gotten the sense that we are entitled to have good things happen to us.
Absolutely, before I got to your last paragraph the first thing that went through my mind was "sense of entitlement" to a trouble-free life. As our standard of living and life expectancy has increased, people have grown to expect more, and will go to extraordinary lengths to insulate and protect themselves from what they consider "evil." And the definition of "evil" has changed too. For some, the absence of "evil" is not only the trouble-free life but continuous upward mobility, and being able to do whatever one wants without any physical or economic constraints. When the stock market crashed on '08 and the recession hit, I had hoped that people would begin to count their blessings and consider what is really important in life, which can be a big help in weathering any storm. But I see no evidence that has happened.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a friend of mine for many years who died in 1996 in her early 60s. She had been diagnosed earlier with Multiple Sclerosis. We talked about it at that time, and her minister counseled with her, she was UCC. At one point she told me that she had initially thought "Why me?" But then after prayer and reflection she thought "Why not me?" I don't know of many people who could empty themselves to that degree to be able to arrive at that. Most people feel cheated when facing something like this, and only get beyond it when death is imminent. I'm not judging because I don't know how I would react under similar circumstances. But it makes me wonder.
ReplyDeleteYes that is something isn't it. My mother died last year and she got stronger and stronger the closer her death came. I was in awe.
ReplyDeleteI talk a brave game when considering this stuff in the abstract but I have no idea what i will be like when I really face death.
I'm sorry Jules, I didn't realize your loss was relatively new. My mother died 15 yrs ago, and I had a similar experience. The closer it got the less concerned she was.
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