Why Do People Die In Fires?

Going to the heart of the work of the Fire Department, the question to put to God, why do people die in fires?  Police or military may ask why people die in violence, but this is the FD question.  I have a very unsatisfactory answer.  I do not really know.

I have an abstract, religious-type answer, it has to do with the fundamental evil of the universe and the sinfulness of humanity and the brokenness of creation, but that doesn’t seem like enough.  It also sounds like I am trying to defend a God who lets people die in fires.  From a certain point of view, I am.

Why am I asking this question now?  There hasn’t been, to my knowledge, a sudden death that requires expression.  It is the same reason you send a probie through the smoke box with all their equipment on, trying to squeeze through some narrow opening at the end.  Better to challenge something now, in the safety of practice, than when you run into the reality.

This started as a general question, but now consider the specific.  Why did that person, whom I could not get to, have to die in that fire?  I am pretending the role of a firefighter now.  It is one thing to consider the question is the broad sense, but how about the personal?  We have an ability, as a species, to put distance between ourselves and the tragic.  On the one hand, it lets us function, on the other hand, it lets us ignore.

There is a lot here, a lot more than one simple ‘meditation’ can answer.  But if we don’t ask the question in preparation, will we fall over the question when trying to find resolution?

 

What Kind of Healer is a Chaplain?

We don’t provide medical services or promote physical healing.  Neither do we lead physical training, except where we encourage the precept that the body is a temple.  Not being Roman, this is not an endorsement of creating a temple to Bacchus, the god of wine and debauchery. 

We don’t go rummaging around in your brains, we aren’t head shrinkers, we’re not going to invite you to lie down on the couch, sip some White Zinfandel and tell us about your feelings.  When we make diagnoses about depression or PTSD or something else related to mental health, at best we are educated, relatively observant laypeople working from long experience with our fellow human beings.  At worst, we’ve been watching too much television. 

No, the chaplain deals with that imprecise term of ‘spiritual care’.  We’re not talking alcoholic spirits or evil spirits.  No, spiritual care is about the human spirit.  The human spirit is a level of our humanity beneath our physical, beneath our mental, even beneath our emotional selves. 

The spirit is the iron in our being.  I’ve met 95 year old ladies, physically more brittle than uncooked spaghetti, but spiritually harder than a Marine Corps DI.  You can force them to do something, but you can’t make them.  That spirit is what sent First Responders back into the North Tower after the South Tower collapsed on 9-11.  That spirit drives when everyone else says it can’t be done and you do it anyway. 

Your emotional reactions are governed from your spirit.  Your mental toughness finds foundation in the toughness of your spirit.  Your physical health can hold up miraculously on the energy of your spirit.  The spirit is the thing of miracles, connecting us to questions of eternity.  Which is why chaplains deal with it.

What Does The Killing All Have in Common?

It seems like a confluence of events.  Twenty dead in Paris, death among police officers and the civilian population on the front pages here, ISIS calling for terror attacks everywhere, an island nation slowly drowning, no escape, always something more. 

And then, this morning, in my own devotional work, the apostle Peter says “Grace and peace to you all in in abundance.” 

Yah.

Where does our grace and peace come from as followers of Jesus?  In his death.  Seems to me this is a unique start to a religion, the leader being a lamb led to the slaughter.

The Good News is that three days later, God brought Jesus back to life, and the miracle of life from death is given to all who believe by the good grace of our God up in heaven.  But the fact is that our faith was born from violence.  And it grew up in violence. 

From attempts to kill it off by the Romans through the religious wars-for political gain, for right belief, for national and political advance, the vestiges of which can still be seen in a few places like Northern Ireland, our history is bloody.

And while I would love to say that this violence and killing no longer affect my faith, I would need to live in a box not to know the reality.  Where America is involved around the world, our faith is involved.  Maybe we don’t define ourselves this way, but radicalized Islam is fighting a religious war, against Christians, against Jews, against atheists (Charlie Hedbe).

Grace and peace come to us through the violence and death committed against Jesus Christ.  I wonder, in my soul, how we can pray for and work for and accelerate the power of the Living God to bring grace and peace again through this violence and death.

The hardest part is going to be changing on the minds of my fellow believers.  There are a lot of Christians out there who explain the violence and death as simply the playing out of the Book of Revelation, that there is no grace and there is no peace to be had until Jesus comes again.

Makes me think there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we are understanding and interpreting God’s Word if we believe that God’s plan is to leave us all to rot.

Charlie Hebdo: Bullets for Words?

One of the lines in our communion liturgy says that “Jesus was beaten for what people thought he had done”.  They were false accusations.  Jesus died for lies in order to save us.  It was a horrible experience, one that we should accept with the humblest of gratitude.  That line rings in my head as I’ve watched the news reports on the executions in Paris of the staff of a satirical magazine.  Twelve people dead, names called out by the murderers, such a horrible, horrible waste.

It is like some kind of psychotic upping of the ante after “The Interview” was postponed due to terroristic threats, humans actually believing that they have the right, given by God and their own insanity, to kill people for what they say, what they write, what they draw.  Words answered with bullets.  So who has the more persuasive argument?

On a gut level, my reaction is that these murders should be hunted down and killed.  That is worth an eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, life for life.  NOT cartoon for life!

My mind does not want to come back to the connection this has with the death of Jesus.  I do not quite understand why I want to avoid it.  Jesus’ death was senseless, he was killed by extremists who did not like what he had to say, but it served a far larger purpose in the history of humanity.  It demonstrated faith carried to death, even death on the cross.

Three days later, he was raised again from the dead that no one else may die.  That promise carries with it, I hope, relief for the future, but in the here and now, that promise feels thin against the weight and measure of our grief.

But the fact of it was that Jesus’ death was not in vain.  There is an object lesson.  How do we live lives after what happened there so that they will not have died in vain?  We do not let ourselves be scared into silence.  We rejoice in the spoken word, the written word, and the illustrated word as freedoms of our expression.  We exercise our right to express our disagreement, our distaste, our hatred, and our abhorrence for those words that are insulting and anathema to us.

But we defend in blood the right to be able to share those words. 

A Hundred Feet Closer to God

From the top of Ladder 2, I could see the Liberty Tower rising from the memory of the Twin Towers and 360 degrees all around.  It was cold, it was clear, it was glorious.  Then, a couple of blocks over, reality returned.  It is a senior building, and Ladder 2 would be used to bring off survivors, patients, or victims trapped nine floors up.

To have the apparatus explained, its function, its maintenance, its performance, the cool tools of the trade, it’s mind blowing to a civilian, even one with a collar on. 

The flip side of the ‘coolness’ is that the apparatus is part of the deliberate risk to life and limb to save the lives of others that is the assumption of the Job.  And that is even more mind blowing to a civilian with a collar on.  It sounds downright religious in its possibilities, a WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) thing. 

Now, I suspect there is, in the tradition of fire fighter initiation, something akin to the ‘swirly’ of the bygone days of high school (what was a swirly back then would probably be assault today), but I suspect even the chaplain would be worthy if he started talking about how fire fighters are really like Jesus.

There is the culture of drinking, smoking, and ‘colorful’ language to be considered.

But what I think real faith is not in right words or proper manners.  Rather, in the face of danger, real faith is in the faces of those who would stand with you, or those who would walk you out of the way so you don’t get hurt while they can deal with it.

The Padre

The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies

I was looking at my copy of “The Hobbit”, one moderately sized paperback novel, one of my favorites.  The last movie adaptation took up the last couple of chapters.  And it was hideous.  The violence was gratuitous, overdone, and well beyond the spirit of the novel.

Three movies were necessary for the treatment of the “Lord of the Rings”, three books long, such incredible themes, such a world to explore.  And, despite the length, there were parts of “The Hobbit” movies that I liked to.  In “Desolation of Smaug”, the battle of the barrels in the river and the battle inside the mountain between the dwarves and Smaug were stunning.  I could even get into the presence of Legolas-but what’s up with the eyes?

I have seen much, I have written much, I have imagined much that is overtly and excessively violent and brutal (two different things).  I guess what bothered me about this last installment of The Hobbit was knowing how the novel was written.  It did not have the darkness of the “Lord of the Rings”.  I remember the billing on the copy I read in school, “The Enchanting Prelude to the Lord of the Rings”. 

This was not. 

Peter Jackson does BIG better than any filmmaker today, in my opinion.  And “The Battle of Five Armies” will not disappoint in that department.  But it is not the Lord of the Rings and it should not have been filmed trying to match LOTR’s size and scale.

I wonder if the DVD will have a blooper reel. 

Ferguson “…a time to grieve, and a time to dance…”

          Did a white cop hunt down and execute a black teenager?  Was it an execution?  Planned or spur of the moment, did Officer Wilson decide that the color of an 18 year old was reason enough to kill him?  Many in the community think so.  And they believe the prosecutor colluded with the police to make sure he faced no charges for his actions.  They responded with riots.

          What are to do?  How do we sort out right from wrong, innocent from guilty?  How do we allow the ‘system’ to do its work when it is believed that the system protects the guilty?  How do we respond to a community so despondent, up to its neck in racial and economic inequality, a powder keg of angry response, when the fuse has been lit and the detonation has occurred?

          Do we take days and weeks to sift through all the public data to arrive at our own conclusion?  Do we take sides?  Do we trust the Holy Spirit to give us special insight into the circumstances of the shooting?

           Instead of entering into a polarized situation on one side or the other, shall we instead come alongside the person in pain and seek to help bring healing, seek to help bring understanding, seek to help repair the brokenness?  Can we work through our own grief and anger so that, in turn, we may help another to do the same?  Let us be there until they can think again.  Then shall we talk?

 

Lord, in our grief and anger, may you hold us so very tight to you.  Amen.

Kiribati: A Vanishing Nation

Genesis 1:26 “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image…And let them have dominion…”

So, it’s an ad sponsored by Microsoft, appearing before the movie trailers, skyping journalists recording the slow but inexorable drowning of a nation.  Kiribati is in the Pacific, the lowest land levels in the world, victims to rising sea levels.  I guess I kind of knew about it, heard about it somewhere along the way. 

We are responsible for what has happened.  We have decided what our priorities are in the dominion of the earth and we have made decisions which are now drowning a nation.  Our development has released warming chemicals into the atmosphere, we are melting the Arctic and Antarctic ice packs, and Kiribati is our first victim.

Is there a voice that will cry out in the urban landscape that we must change the world?  Well, who cares?  It’s not like Miami is going to drown…oh…

Kiribati…can anyone even find it on a map?  Well, draw a line from Sydney, Australia to the southern tip of the Big Island in Hawaii and, a little more than halfway up along the line, you run into their territorial water-space.  And…I have to admit, I am not exactly sure which island is first to drown.

But that doesn’t matter.  Their land is being taken from them.  We are one in God’s image.  We must change things.

Where shall change come?  When enough voices are lifted to the Lord, then humans have no choice but to bring about the change.