Crime Scenes and Compassion

Earlier this week I stepped out of my door onto the walking path.  The sky was clear and brilliant blue in every direction save for a faint smudge that was the sleeping moon, God’s thumbprint on a new day. 

As I walked, somewhere in Utah the police stepped into a crime scene searching for evidence, a fingerprint perhaps.  A young man, a boy really, had turned assassin.  Where could he be?  Why did he do it?

Somewhere else, a grief stricken family stepped out onto the tarmac to receive the body of their son, husband, and father. He had left his handprint on their hearts.  They will be devastated for a long time to come.

Little was known about the shooter that morning.  The victim was well known. Many people disagreed strongly with the victim’s rhetoric.  Right or wrong in his point of view, killing him was wrong, and it did not make him a saint, but it did make him a martyr, silencing the opposition, elevating his words and beliefs, giving them even more attention and power.  People who had never heard of him will now remember him forever.  No one will remember the shooter’s name.  He will be just another lost boy with a gun.

I walked on thinking of all of them, all of us.  We are all part of the same family.  Every mother and father can imagine the grief of both sets of parents, both families. A mother myself, I ponder the question, “what is happening to our sons?” Why are they especially vulnerable to the hate proliferating in our society through our politics, social media, and video games?  Why, increasingly, do polls show young men believe in violence as a solution to life’s problems?

As an aging adult, I am exhausted by the hate and cruelty of some of our politicians and by the unchecked social media that generates continuous, unrelenting outrage to sell advertising.  Perhaps a young person still gaining control of his impulses and the powers of his mind is unable to manage it, to shove it down, to find another outlet.  In the growing isolation in which we live, the anger, outrage, and hatred grow unchecked inside him.  Maybe the pain of being invisible just makes him want to be seen, to be remembered…

I walked along that morning contemplating what has happened to our humanity.  Fifty years ago a self-esteem movement began to gain momentum.  Perhaps thinking of oneself has gone too far.  We now live in an age of narcissism.  Long past loving our neighbors as ourselves, we elected a man for president who once boasted that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue in New York and get away with it, a man convicted of sexual assault and fraud, a man who has upended the entire world with his cruelty. Is this the new role model for young men?

Alone on the path, I thought of the parable of the Good Samaritan, a story in which robbers strip, beat, and leave a Jewish man for dead alongside a road.  A Jewish priest and a Levite cross the street to avoid the victim, to pass him by, but another traveler, a Samaritan is “moved with compassion” and stops to help even though Jews and Samaritans were known to be antagonistic toward one another. 

Perhaps the Jewish priest and the Levite who passed by the suffering victim thought only about themselves, their fears, their reputations:  “What’s in it for me?  What are the risks to me if I stop?  What will people in my social circle think of me?” But the Samaritan was capable of thinking first about the victim: “What will happen to him if I don’t stop?”  Perhaps, implicit in that thought was the Samaritan’s belief that his own soul would be irreparably damaged if he failed to attend to his neighbor’s needs.  The Samaritan boldly left his fingerprints at the scene of the crime because he did not need to hide.

I returned home exhausted by the awareness that the hateful rhetoric would likely escalate in the days ahead, that any attempt at conversation would be deemed evidence of being “far right” or “radical left.”

As I stepped inside my home, I glanced back at the thumbprint on the sky and silently promised the One who had left it there that I will stop for a stranger in need regardless of his politics. Compassion is the high road and the only road out of this mess.