A man is dead. Not a good man but a man who lead others to acts of terror and terrorism all over the world. A bad man. And yet how much better are those who hunted him down and killed him?
I quoted Martin Luther King Jr. whose thoughs I greatly admire in FB. This is the quote:
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence,
and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction ...
The chain reaction of evil — hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars —
must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. 1963
He has also said this:
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
I understand hating the dead man. I do. I understand wanting to destroy him, to kill him. But I don't agree. I don't. Not because I am any better myself. If anyone were to touch my loved ones I'd want them punished. I'd want them dead. And yet, to take another person's life, is just wrong. Everything in me says so.
And it isn't just that. What now? The group is not going to go "poof" and disapppear. Now there's a martyr of the highest rank, their leader. Now if ever they will want revenge and destruction. And what will happen after that? More violence.
In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.
A storyteller named Suzi Robertson (not me) posted this on Facebook today:
ReplyDelete'I told the "The Parable of the Good Shepherd" as a children's time in worship on Sunday. I don't usually do children's sermons. It was as much for the adults as the children. This was reported to me this evening by a parent. "Weekly" magazine was laying on the coffee table of their home on Sunday evening. It had a cartoon of Osama bin Laden on it. Miles picked it up and asked what the cartoon was about. His mother explained the story of the 9/11 bombings and the history behind bin Laden. She then asked him, "Do you think this man is still one of Jesus' sheep?" Miles said, "Yes. He went into one of those dark places and got lost and it changed him."'