Editorial

Faith, Hope, Charity

Since the terrorist attacks, we've had a shift in perspective. There has been a blurring of the line between who we are as individuals and what we are as a people.

We are more certain, yet less confident. We have withdrawn, yet are reaching out. We've put down our microscope and picked up a telescope.

And Ken Kesey has died.

Planes full of innocents dissolve into skyscrapers. Great plumes of fire devour fathers. A mother's love evaporates as her desk collapses into rubble. My love was lost!

The success of atrocities in the name of God committed by religious "fundamentalists" tests our faith. Then fundamentalists in our own country defile themselves and horrify neighbors with a callous effort to use our tragedy to their own ends.

Ken Kesey was a spiritual man who defied religion, a writer who defied convention, an individualist who believed in community. He was a rebel and true American who recognized that fundamentalism distorts the vision of God.

Before September 11, we could hide from the implications of death without reason. It is harder to hide from the hideous irrationality of 4,500 innocents dying in an inferno created by men who hated yet never met them.

Our lazy hubris has been pierced, our smugness that God always smiles upon industrious and good individuals, and that the poor and broken among us must somehow deserve their lot in life.

That arrogance went down in flames when we saw thousands of industrious and good people die in the fireballs of New York and Washington, D.C.

That memory will define the world of our children. We could become nihilists, suffering from the belief that what we do doesn't matter, since God took good people along with the evil.

But instead of crushing our goodness, the atrocity has matured us. The facile belief that we were anointed has been replaced by faith.

Faith that if we are good, the world will be a better place, that doing good creates good, that a good life is eternal, though it may be short; that life without good is hell on earth.

Faith, not knowledge. Knowledge tells us that the irrational and evil still lurk just beyond the edge of the fire light.

Ken Kesey embraced the irrational at the edge of darkness, recognized that there lay creation, there lay individual freedom, liberty. But he was a spiritual man, and there were contradictions.

Followers spoke of "free love," yet Kesey spoke against abortion. To a woman who asked what to do if raped, Kesey replied, "God doesn't care whose shovel plants the corn."

Along with faith, we have hope. They are frequently confused, but are not the same.

We hope our son on the battlefield will not take a bullet, we hope the next bomb does not fall on our city, we hope we are not among those stricken with disease, not among those taken early before we have lived and loved and made our peace with living and with dying.

We may have found faith, but know we are not immune. Not as a country, not as individuals. We are not immune from lightning and thunder and hope it strikes far from home.

Kesey wrote "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion." In these great books he celebrated the individual, yet recognized each of us is but a thread in a piece of cloth; without the weave we would be lost.

We appreciate that it might be one of us lost if the fabric frays, but if another is closer to the edge, there is also a greater responsibility to reach out and restore that one to the fold.

We have a greater sense of charity.

Charity is the response of good people to knowledge that the universe can tumble lives of individuals about as if there were no reason.

Tumble the lives of those lost to terrorist madness; children in rural America raised by parents bent on their next hit of meth; women in Afghanistan imprisoned by war that has endured for 23 years; babies in Africa slowly starving.

Who we are and what we have are products of good fortune as well as personal achievement. Charity -- generosity of spirit and self sacrifice -- comes from knowing this, not just the fact that any of us could need it some day.

Let us give thanks.