"But even if he will not..."

A few days ago I made reference to Daniel 3, focusing on the beginning of verse 18. My point was that faith was not conditional on a good outcome. In the story, the three faithful men are saved, but the passage makes it clear that the men would not be shaken from their faith even when the situation looked dire.

I have been thinking about a lot of things lately, but I was incredibly moved by the interview with Don Yun Yoon's interview on TV the other day. I really can't imagine losing my family, and I have serious doubts about rather I would have such Christian instincts in the immediate aftermath of such a tragedy. In Daniel, the three men are saved from a fiery death, Yoon's family were not saved. There was no divine intervention. But even though 'He did not', Yoon's faith and charity can be seen even in his obvious grief.

In addition to sad, this makes the situation very humbling for me. I went searching to see if there was something Yoon or his friends wanted those of us expressing sympathy to do; donate to a charity, a fund to help with the material loss, that sort of thing. I did find this, and would encourage people to help if they can. But I was actually surprised at how little discussion Google turned up. I thought that this would be a topic for all the blogs and forums, but if that is occurring, I don't see it.

The same thing happened with the illegal immigrant who stopped and helped the boy whose mother had been killed in an accident in the desert, even though it meant his own arrest and deportation. If a high profile Catholic or politician said, in passing, "you know, if I were a woman and I was raped and beaten by Satan, I probably would at least consider an abortion..." there would be countless posts with endless pages of comments connected to them. Most from red faced people beating their own heads hard enough to make their ears bleed proclaiming that anyone not in lock step agreement with them was an obvious agent of evil...

But when we hear actually stories about people being good Christians under adversity, we do not seem very interested. My first thought was that perhaps the problem is that the people involved are not white. After all, plenty of people applauded the "fine Christian example" of Sarah Palin's unwed pregnant daughter. A more depressing thought is that, perhaps, our faith has become just another stick that we use to whack each other.

If you collapse "the least among" us to fertilized zygotes and sexual morality to not being gay, you get all the benefits of moral indignation and self righteousness, without any of the inconvenience of self realization or introspection. If the point is no longer humble service in the spirit of Christ's teachings, then stories like Yoon's are not so interesting. After all, his message is forgiveness, gratitude, and unity. Most our religious dialog is focused on establishing who is 'good' and who is 'bad' (with the people doing the speaking inevitably in the 'good' group themselves).

Another sobering possibility is that, like racism, we might be missing another of Jesus' often repeated lessons. We tend to think of the Pharisees as obviously bad people, but Jesus' audience would have considered them ultra religious war heroes. They were overt nationalists and xenophobes. So, if we are disinterested because of race, we are ignoring all Jesus' pointed references to the strangers among us, or his repeated use of despised and mistrusted foreigners as examples of righteousness in parables. But Jesus also aggressively challenged another widely held belief, that success and misfortune are closely tied to grace. A horrible disability was not an unfortunate twist of fate, but much deserved punishment from God. Spiritual and material wealth were widely seen as connected...

As far as I can tell, these ideas are very much alive and well today. You are poor because you are lazy. The idea that someone's poverty might be influenced by how the wealthy utilize their power is just 'bleeding heart excuses from people who like wasting other people's money'. I see something similar with my son. Many people still assume that his behaviors are evidence of poor parenting, not his severe neurological disability.

Similar thoughts seem to surround our concept of 'heroic'. In victory, the definition of 'hero' is pretty broad. But in failure, the word 'hero' is only used in a few narrow circumstances. Perhaps that is why we are so indifferent to all the devastating head injuries that are the symbol for the war in Iraq. A 'hero' is someone with steely eyes whose dignified bearing is marred by only the slightest of limps. A man in a wheel chair, who no longer recognizes his own children and who is fed baby food with a plastic spoon...

We are a clearly a results oriented society. Paris Hilton was born spectacularly wealthy, but making yourself more famous by glorifying selfishness and stupidity or performing sex acts with a cheeseburger on a car, that is something we can look up to... But our faith is about how we act, regardless of the outcome. It is probably best exemplified in situations like Yoon's, when we are facing tragedy or failure.

In that light, perhaps it is not so surprising that we are not interested. Yoon's spiritual victory over horrible personal tragedy just isn't the sort of 'winning' we are used to celebrating.

Update: Beauty and Depravity (which I found just yesterday searching for the Church/Autism story) asks the same question.