Invisible

The past seven days have been surreal. Must be a dream, must be imagined, must be...not real. The Velveteen Bunny. King Arthur and Lancelot. Sherlock. Characters, not people.

Headline when I turned on my computer this morning: Dead Baby Found in NY Recycling Plant.

As a poet, as a writer, as a lover of God, just try to get your head around that one. Macabre. No other word fits. It's like, well...we are all recycled, aren't we? Eventually. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. Kind of contradicts the belief in God. That is, if you think God uses physics to create the universe. Get it, God follows our rules...it's a joke.
Like a dead baby found in a recycling plant. It has to be a joke. But it isn't a joke. Soylent Green. For real. No. But a horrible, terrible story accompanies the fact that the child was found. That way. In a bag. In a recycling plant.
The story reveals that the child was not born alive. That gives me some comfort...sort of. The crime is not one of murder, but of gross ignorance, or neglect. It is tragic more than terrible. The characters in the story need to be pitied, for the end result meant some woman was perhaps alone, or being abused, or a child, not knowing what to do, or someone filled with hate or anger...so many things to imagine.

I identify with the things I know. If you are reading, you take the story into things you know.

"You don't matter."

I've read it in books, many plots, stories of success and failure, surround those words: "You don't matter." That statement is the true opposite of "I love you." Even hate implies love once existed. That is the whole purpose of shunning. The pain of not mattering.

I kind of think that is the whole purpose of the Bible, to remind us that everything matters, everyone matters. To live a complete, full life, we must recognize that truth: it all matters.

That's much too big a thought, though. Like trying to imagine the whole universe at once...just too much there for a human brain to think.

Because the only way to live in this universe, knowing that everything matters...is to live detached from it, because it is so big.  To look well at one thing means you cannot look well upon something else. Because we are human, and we do not have a row of eyes peering into every direction all the time. And to see it all...really see...what could we do about it, beyond seeing it? It would make us crazy, to think that we had to engage it all, address it all, make it all "better."

So, being human, being finite, we live part in, part out, of reality. And we have to work at not letting the "truth" of what we see make us crazy. The "dumpster baby" stories have been trumped for me with the "baby found in a recycling plant." Why does this story matter to me and other stories, such as the devastation in the Philippines, affect me so differently?
Because the latter story is, in most part, an event of nature. Yes, man is involved...but not to the extent that a person, or persons were involved in the deliberate choice of discarding a child's body in this particular fashion. It affects me differently, because of my own life story.
Not in a recycling plant, I have to admit, I felt discarded as a child. The body lived in the house where I grew up, but it was obvious I didn't matter. It was obvious to me anyway. So I did things to be noticed, even being noticed in a bad way was better than not existing.
I write that because I want to encourage you to really look at the "Lazarus-es" in your life. They matter to God...and thus, they should matter to you, because you will hear about it later, if you believe in God and hope to meet Him someday. I don't think God will chastise you for the choice you made to ignore someone, but I think He will bring it up...because, before you get into Heaven, you have to know what you did...and didn't do. I think it kind of works like that. I could be wrong.

There was also a story about a murder trial here in Texas. The murderer argued that he killed the girl, a young girl, because she had "ruined his life" by accusing him of child molestation. So he killed her. Texas, of course, is seeking the death penalty. It is far easier to just destroy rather than rebuild, or heal...they can recycle him and maybe get a better human being later...right? There are so many ways to observe this one: how self-centered we can be, how we think the whole world revolves around us, how everything was made for us alone, and how we can create laws in our heads that justify every one of our actions. And we can be accusers, and simply eliminate those life forms that violate our comfortable lives. I am talking about both the murderer and the "jury," that is, the State of Texas.

The only thing I know as true here is that: people were not loved and people were not observed. And evil entered...and won the battle...but perhaps not the war.

We can go on forever, in discussion and in disagreement, about how to solve the problem of being living, breathing, finite creatures. We can acquired many things in our lifetime, we can be both the "haves" and the "have nots"...but

if we do not love, we are only stardust...love is the only answer...or we are nothing. It is the only real thing we can leave behind, it is the only thing that can make us truly immortal. Love.

And I kind of think it takes an entire lifetime to figure out what that means. But it includes a whole bunch of forgivenesses, of self and others. Of the world...of being completely and totally engaged while not being attached. Of risking all that you are to become fully human. Of forgiving impossible things and loving especially the ones who vex your soul. Of self-giving and dying to idea that you are not a god.

And making sure, to the best of your ability, that no one feels invisible. That everyone knows: they matter.

Love, Cindy