Many of you would have heard with horror yesterday’s news story of a father from a well to do suburb, allegedly murdering his four year old daughter here in Melbourne.
In the midst of a records heatwave, a father of three was returning from his beach house in order to get the kids to their first day of school. As morning rush hour traffic slowed on the Westgate bridge, horrified commuters saw the man stop his car, unbuckle his daughter from her seat and walk up to the edge of the bridge and drop her 58 metres to her death. (read full story here )
When I was younger and in my twenties, such stories affected me but I was able to hold a kind of distance from them. But now that I am a father, with a daughter of my own, such a story can only simply floor me. It is almost as if when you become a parent the castle walls are removed from around your heart and such tragedies hit with a force that they could not before.
How could such a thing happen? What causes someone to do something like this? Was he having a psychiatric episode? Was it a custody battle? What caused such a moment of evil? Our first response is to see such an offender as less than human, to deal with such a tragedy by seeing such a man as an animal. Part of me wants to see this incident through such a lens, it is much easier to deal with it in that way. But as a follower of Christ I cannot. To do so would avoid the reality that evil is much more complicated than our culture would like to admit.
The great Russian Christian and political dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn after observing the worst of human behaviour during his time in a Soviet prison camp, expressed the Christian view of evil in this way,
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
If we are really honest there are people everywhere, particularly men in whom a slow cooking anger boils. I am not saying that everyone of us is capable of such an act of murder. But I know that such an anger has boiled in me sometimes. That as a male, frustration, desperation and anger can cause a reaction that frightens even yourself. When most men are honest there is a least one moment when we have felt such uncontrollable anger, and have directed it others, at objects or at themselves.
I remember speaking to a prison chaplain, he told me that prisons were filled with career criminals, people who had been raised in or fallen into the criminal class. Yet prisons were also filled with normal, decent men, who let that anger boil away unchecked, who allowed their inner world to turn toxic, and in a moment of madness let the rage explode out. That anger can combine with sleeplessness or alchohol or drugs and end up ruining their own and their loved ones lives in a moment of inexplicable violence. Prisons are filled with men who sit and who cannot believe that for a matter of seconds they did not recognize themselves, that they became that man that they never thought that they would be and that those few seconds of madness destroyed their world and the world of their loved ones.
As a culture it is essential that we make it a priority to have excellent psychiatric care available, we need systems, counselling, education, programs, facilities and structures to help people who are suffering with such anger, depression and frustration. Such programs are able to alleviate many problems, yet they are unable to deal with the root cause of the existential angst that causes so much desperation, anger and violence today.
As a follower of Christ I also believe that we that we are charged with an important responsibility. A responsibility to allow God to work on the project of our inner lives. We are also called to partner with him in this enterprise to move each day towards allowing his shalom peace to transform our inner world. To many this will sound so ‘Christian cliche’, so ‘Sunday school 1986′, but I would like to humbly assert that I have come to believe, that the task of personal holiness is actually one of the most socially radical steps anyone can take. To admit that the potential for evil is not ‘out there’ amongst a certain group of people but inside of ech one of us, is an incredibly counter cultural prophetic step to take. It takes Romans 3:12 and Solzhenitsyn’s wisdom seriously, that if we are to rid the world of injustice and evil we must begin with our own hearts.
In an age where mission has increasingly become one dimensional, we need to rediscover the radical subversive nature of evangelism. We need to ge to the task of encouraging others to encounter Christ, to allow him to transform their inner worlds. To engage in this task is to partner with God in his plan to redeem the world, to walk with him towards a future in which such horrors as we heard of yesterday are an ancient memories from our world’s past.
