One of my favorite lines from The Sound of Musichappens after Captain von Trapp has listed off to Maria all of the governesses that they have had for his children. Maria after hearing the number asks the reasonable question of what is wrong with the children. The Captain replies, “Nothing is wrong with the children, only the governesses.” It touches on the age-old theme of locating all of our problems outside of ourselves. The Captain’s children are fine; it’s all the governesses’ problem. The originator of this line of reasoning is of course Adam in the Book of Genesis. If you recall, when God asks him if he has eaten from the tree of which he was commanded not to eat, he replies, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Adam’s problems were not of his doing; they originated from somewhere else. In fact, Adam is bold enough to make it all God’s fault.
I thought about all of this today after reading a rather moving article in the Wall Street Journal by Lou Weiss, a Pittsburgh carpet salesman and a Jew, who knew five of the eleven individuals who were murdered in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue. In it he stated something so refreshing and opposite of how our world seems to work these days saying, “The best way to honor the people who were murdered would be to emulate their decency and goodness.” When a tragedy of this magnitude strikes we are so used to using the events as a way to get mad at some group we do not like. We rail that this would not have happened if others were more like us and agreed with all of our views. But I have to say that Mr. Weiss seems the wiser and more grace filled one, for it seems far better to take the tragic events as a way for us to be better. We cannot fix the past, but we can make today better.
Lashing out at others is quite easy and generally asks nothing difficult from us – they are wrong we are right. But emulating decency and goodness takes some effort and some self-reflection. Yes, there are certainly evil and bad things in this world, but the evil that we have the best chance of fixing is that which exists within us.
I realize some people will object to my notion that we all have evil in us, but I absolutely do mean it. Just because we have not gone on a shooting rampage does not make us pure and clean. Just because we can find someone who acts worse than we do does not mean that all of our actions are pure and noble.
We have been trying Adam’s method for a very long time, where our reaction to anything wrong with ourselves or the world in general is to point to another person or group whom we think has sinned even more. That is we like to create cosmic scales of justice wherein our sins are light as a feather when compared to the heinousness of others. But what if we tried a different tact? What if we did not take evil actions as a way to justify ourselves or point our anger at our perceived enemies, but rather took it as an opportunity to look into ourselves and ask how can we get better, how can we grow more into the image of God? How can we emulate decency and goodness?
I am not capable of fixing all of the problems in the world, but I am, with God’s help, able to gradually change myself to be more Christ-like.