War of the Fallen

"We have a thousand machines for making war but none for making peace. We have computer and iPhone apps that can make millions out of a tiny change in exchange rates, but none that rescue the poorest countries from their plight."

NT Wright, "Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues"

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Dear Alex,

Two older women of different temperaments and tolerance have told me this past week about losing their jobs. Both are waging an invisible war within and beyond themselves. At mid-age, they will need to compete for their piece to make peace with a thousand machines and millions more in exchange for just wages. And that's the easy part.

The battleground is fiercer internally. They have been jolted, stone-faced and stone-walled, now yanked out as weeds without cashable worth from their customary ways of working and living. When you look and feel small, the smallness inflates to cancel you out. You are nobody. You are somebody. You are a body of brooding blunder, a tongue-twister out of tango from the rest of the New World tapping and smacking on porky apps. The poor shall be made poorer.

Now I am not an expert in humanitarian field work or policy development but I specialize in creating 17.5 billions of excuses about how I am one of multitudes helplessly hoarding more than giving. My two friends seeking work now would not take cash as free-loaders. Their plight does not reduce them to poverty in spirit. In veins and sinews, they show me that the cashless giver can give more and the cashable gift means less. Looking up, they stare not at the sky but the Sun.

How much poorer do I feel in my posh office seat - with the cushioning of air buffering my fears and my juicy tangelo on desk in rock ‘n roll? The war rages on in me.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

A colleague said more than once in front of everyone she would never volunteer.  She said it not with pride, but with conviction.  I think she did try to explain once, the first time when she made the announcement, but since then she would just make the simple statement and look away.

What I got from her one and only explaining is that when something needs to be done it will be done somehow when the price is right.  Good deeds need to be rewarded accordingly and she would take cash.  Someone else might take vainglory or a passport to heaven but that's the person's business and she judges not.

I think she has a point.

Everybody is up to something, all the time.  To want to give away a piece of myself and ask for nothing in return, I am probably hungering for what the receiver cannot afford.  I am probably more desperate than a person who would settle for the face value of a dollar bill.

So much good can be done.  So much good needs to be done.  So little is done by so very few of us.  The longest distance is between heaven and hell, what a human being aspires to be and what he or she actually is.  We have a pretty good idea about what good is, but there is not much good in a good pretty idea.  The moment we open our mouth to speak about the plights of others we call attention to our own might.  Who cares if no one cares about my caring?

We have all fallen short of the glory we claim to stand for.

Yours, Alex