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Heaven & Earth
Whose Good? Who's Evil?
Evil Exists in Our Failures to Own Up, Our Failures to Love
By Alan Morse
All who are married, raise your hands. Or are sisters or brothers.
Friends. All of you who have any relationship with any human being,
raise your hands.
In our partnerships, we share the load of becoming fully human. We
gain stature – and peace – together as we give up parts of ourselves and
assume aspects of others. We grow in respect and trust as we concede
vital roles to those we love. We no longer need tend to the
overwhelming whole, provided we remain safe in relationship. We are social.
As social animals we must do this to realize our human potential.
The lone wolf is just another quadruped. The lone bee is merely a fly.
Being in a society of two – or two billion – frees each of us to
nurture what we love and do best, but does not absolve us of
responsibility for the whole. In our marriages, we must be mindful of
all aspects of life: physical, spiritual, emotional, and social, even as one or
the other becomes more attentive to tending this pasture or that flock.
In our country, and other fundamentalist religious nations of the
world, the human quality of spirituality is as deeply fenced as
territories in a failed marriage.
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Marriages fail when natural divisions devolve into marked
territories, with one partner fenced in, and the other fenced out.
Societies fail the same way.
Our Constitution recognizes that we are a spiritual – even
pious – people, and yet individual in our religious expression. For
some, piety takes the form of ethical, moral behavior with no organized
religion as its framework. For others, organized religion is the
spindle upon which the rest of life is sculpted.
In our country, and other fundamentalist religious nations of the
world, the human quality of spirituality is as deeply fenced as
territories in a failed marriage. One side claims the right to
determine what is moral and good, while the other, aghast at the
excesses of the religious, disclaims spirituality altogether.
But then there's the question of evil. Is evil a religious issue,
or a spiritual – and thereby human – issue? Can those of us who align
ourselves with the secular rather than with the religious still ponder evil?
Does talk about evil carry a religious taint in secular discussion, or
is addressing evil among us our human responsibility?
Our political and personal lives stink too heavily of evil to
relegate that concept to a few, let alone to those few who have
embraced the territory of the spirit to mobilize evil for personal gain.
If evil is an inability to love or to see beyond personal desire, what
other word describes a class or a country which kills for oil, drowns
the poor for real estate, educates for corporate gain, and invariably
places personal benefit above collective good? What other word
describes people who permit this in their names?
What about those who speak but do not act for change in themselves
and their communities? Can we call that evil also?
We abdicate our humanity when we fail to label and address the evil
among us. We lone humans, no longer tending the pack or the hive,
become nothing but a biped scourge on the earth.
Alan Morse lives and writes in Phillips, Maine.
This article first appeared on Common Dreams.
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