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Jump into the Fountain, Save the Life You Can
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| 4/3/2009 |
Imagine that you are walking around Logan Circle, in the summer when so many kids are playing in the fountains, and you notice one child floundering, and then go face first into the water. You look around, and no one else—parents or a babysitter—are there, and you realize the child might drown. What do you do?
It’s not a trick question. You run into the fountain, of course, and save the child. Who wouldn’t?
To complicate the story a bit more, you are wearing a new pair of shoes for which you paid two hundred dollars. No time to kick them off, and as you decide whether to jump into the fountain, you realize that you’re going to ruin and lose the new shoes. What would you do? Again, if you have a belly button, you would save the child, regardless of the cost of your shoes.
This little example has been an example in the work of an ethicist and philosopher, Peter Singer. In his latest book, The Life You Can Save, he then adds this example of a child dying by water.
A child in Malawi, Africa, whom you cannot see, is suffering from drinking bad water because the river is polluted. The child has diarrhea that can severely dehydrate and kill. For $200, the cost of the shoes you are easily willing to ruin to save an unknown child in Logan Circle, you can save the child in Malawi, because a trusted, reliable and efficient relief organization, such as OxFam or Episcopal Relief and Development, can get both rehydration salts to the child, and further, dig a clean water well for his village. What do you do?
If you are like me, you don’t respond with $200 for the Malawi child like you jump into the fountain at Logan Circle. Maybe you consider it, or put the letter from a good charitable relief agency on your list to send some money to at the end of the month, or maybe not, because you have a list of good reasons not to. After all, I say, how do I really know the relief will get to the child and save his live (because watchdog websites like charitynavigator.com authenticate the claims of charities). And, up in Logan Circle, I only have to deal with the one life to save. In Malawi, there are tens of thousands. What difference do I make? If every day, when I passed Logan Circle, and saw 1,000 children daily, I would learn to pass by, not being able to save them all.
And, shouldn’t I worry about making the Malawian child, and his village, dependent on Western charity? How can I break this cycle of dependence?
But the philosopher nags at me, stating that if I consider it ethical to save the drowning child that I can see, but not the child who is dying that I cannot see, I am not an ethical person. His point: if I can save a life, I must.
I am not sure I agree, but I feel the challenge.
What resources, what lengths, do we go to in saving a life? Do I use all my resources, such that I can feed my own children, or give them medicine? Of course not! But what do I do?
Our philosopher puts forth a very Lenten challenge. Give up a portion of what you don’t really need, and use the money to save lives.
Now, that’s not so simple, either. After all, there is very little that I really need, but his point is to target the really superfluous items. Does healthy, clean water come out of your tap at home for a penny a glass? Then why buy bottled water for more than a dollar? Can’t I eat out less often? Do I need another pair of $200 shoes? Set a target to reduce my life of costly things I don’t need, and use that found money to save a life. Even the economically challenged American can probably find enough dollars, that if trusted to the right relief agency, can make a real difference in parts of the world where human beings survive on a dollar a day, or less.
Christians, because we believe our lives have been saved, are called to save the lives of others. This isn’t some “pie in the sky” salvation. The saving we are called to do is real, carnal, and physical saving. If someone is hungry, we are to feed him, no questions asked. If you are naked, I am to clothe you, if I have the resource. If I am sick, you are to tend to me, and share the medicine and care that you have; I don’t need a debate on health care reform. If a child is in a prison with walls, or locked in the prison of poor schools and illiteracy, I am to visit with my body, not send my engaged interest from a safe political distance.
In other words, we are to jump into the fountain, the pond, where a child is drowning, not worrying about our shoes. We are called to save lives.
Too many Christians allow the gospel text that we have today from John to mislead us. John 3:16 reads: “God so loved the world (meaning, the people in it) that God have his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”
Really, the Church over the centuries has misled on this passage, suggesting that Jesus refers to salvation in the next world, even if we suffer in this one. That interpretation has been in the interest of a weak, myopic church that is more concerned with its own survival and institutional perpetuation rather than the radical commitment to the poor, suffering and dying that the Church is called to give its life for.
Jesus, though, speaks of the next life, so we are focused on the freedom we have in this life to save lives. “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” That’s about now, not later.
Here is a question that I struggle with as the Rector of this congregation: this fine Sunday morning, we will consume about $500 of heating fuel to keep us warm and toasty in worship. Is this the highest use of our $500? Could we take a couple of Sundays off in the coldest months and use the money to heat the homes of families in our midst who choose between eating and being warm?
But we need to worship, you might say. But what is true worship? Asking God through song and prayer to save us, or to save someone’s life?
[What follows is a paraphrase of the too obscure, yet rather amazing Anglican missionary, the Rev. John Vernon Taylor, who died in 2001. Some of the thoughts are his, and some my responses and dialogue with him. It proves to tricky to specifically quote his ideas and then identify mine. I don’t think he minds. The full essay I am using, The Gospel of Life, is excerpted in Love’s Redeeming Work, page 716ff.]
I don’t have simple answers to these choices and dilemmas. It involves experiencing great pain and takes enormous courage to remain fully exposed and receptive towards the reality of the world around us, towards the reality of the human beings we know, towards the reality of our selves in relation to others whom we cannot even see, but who need us.
When someone is in trouble (like the child in Logan Fountain, or children dying of dehydration in Africa, or anyone for that matter who could be assisted, if not saved, by the resources one of us has but doesn’t really need), we must consider how to respond. Is that not what Jesus calls us to, not in a minimum way, but a maximum way? However, such consideration brings upon us a great deal of trouble and effort, since an ability to respond makes us take responsibility, and a readiness to answer makes us answerable.
Consequently, our growing up in usually a process of closing up. We actually choose to be less alive in order to be less bothered.
Sloth is laziness, but more so unawareness. Awareness makes demands, awareness hurts, so we begin to grow a protective shell and become a little blind, a little deaf, a little dead. Jesus wants to make us undead, unblind, undeaf.
Beware of a spirituality that makes more concerned with the next life than this one. Jesus has taken care of the next life, so we can focus on this one.
I am concerned with a general drift towards an unwitting choice of deadness rather than aliveness, and that is spiritual sickness.
The same deadness that afflicts our personal life also grips the institutions of power and decision-making, sapping the political will.
Many of us choose to grow a protective shell because it is safer and more comfortable that way are not for the most part aware of our deadness, since awareness is the faculty that we have anaesthetized.
Maybe this is what Karl Marx meant when he said that “religion is the opiate of the people.” An opiate is a form of anesthesia. If our religion makes us unaware, should we not put it off? Or, in the spirit of reform, shouldn’t our religion makes us aware? Shouldn’t we simply jump into the fountain and save the life, as we have been saved, rather than carefully be unaware, and somewhat dead ourselves?
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