The Cost of Freedom

September 7, 2021
             Glorious, delightful, practically perfect in every way . . . . . . 
It's the weather of course.  Calendar photographs get taken on days like this.  My puppy sits on the deck just sniffing the air and watching the sheets waving from the clothesline.  My church office window is open to the birdsong and the traffic.  Through the foyer windows I see the armed guards in the Beth Shalom parking lot, protecting the congregation at worship during High Holy Days, and that makes me sad.  God bless and protect them and help us do our part.  A glorious, delightful, practically-perfect-in-every-way day to me, while my next door neighbors need armed security to get through that same day.

             What’s wrong with people?  I ask no one in particular more often than I mean to, more critically, more judgmentally than I want to believe I am.  In my heart and mind I want to respect everyone’s opinion — but I don’t, not really.  I suppose I do believe in everyone’s right to their opinion — but opinions are neither here nor there, not really.  Opinions are just noise until they turn to action — actions that touch other people’s lives as help or hurt or harm.  Then it is no longer an opinion, but an act:  of assistance or aggression, of support or sabotage, of encouragement or destruction.

             I don’t know how to untangle this frustration I feel — my wish to be at one with others while at the same time disagreeing with them so essentially, especially on these life and death matters like racial violence and the refusal to be vaccinated.  I hesitated a long time before equating the two.  The second is definitely more passive, but no less violent under certain conditions.  Like a suicide bomber, only loaded with bio-poison instead of metal shrapnel.  The science is not really debatable among people pervious to common sense.  (Of course, my previous sentence is constantly debated these days.)

             How do I speak in love to my loved ones who have declined the vaccination?  How do I share with them my fear that they will get sick, suffer and die, leaving their little ones without parents in this world, and the rest of us to grieve for them?  From what place do I speak and act, and yet maintain my faith and hope in the truth, truth I believe to be rooted in the Creator of the universe?  Is this the cost of the great freedom we have in our Creator, the freedom to destroy ourselves and one another?  The alternative, of course, is salvation — what Jesus described in the story of the Good Samaritan as loving our neighbors as ourselves, treating other people as we want to be treated.  A man dying in a ditch is ignored by two people and saved by a third.  Two-thirds of the world was perfectly willing to let humans die in ditches.  One third was not.  Jesus commended the third as the one to imitate.  If we can save a person from dying, we should, is what I hear Jesus saying.  Please, friends, please — get your vaccines.  It means everything to the people who love you.