TAKING A SECOND LOOK, ON AUGUST 28

MAYBE GUILT IS SOMETIMES GOOD AFTER ALL

In the west, there are three special strains of guilt. In chronological order: Jewish! Catholic! Puritan! But now what if you suffer all three all at the same time....?

If that sounds like a psychiatrist's dream case, maybe not. Sometimes guilt -- if diluted with the more rational strain of simple regret -- can be useful. Now I know our evolutionary biologists have been studying the merits and demerits of guilt, and they connect them to little more than our genetic makeup. But perhaps the old Jews, Catholics and Puritans got it right in the first place. There are clearly definable wrongs in this life, so there are clearly definable reasons for guilt.

The hangup here for many secularists is that clearly defining such reasons has to suggest some sort of absolute scale of right-and-wrong. In a situational-ethics kind of culture, most secular thinkers reject absolutes. It smacks too much of some old fashioned Judaic-Christian God, and the old guys just doesn't fit conveniently into a modern secular worldview.

But here's where those evolutionary biologists may be missing something important. Just because their materialistic understanding of the cosmos can't find or theorize a personal god may be like a cynic sitting with a poet on a silent summer night. Both are enveloped in the same symphony of stars and smells and and sounds; but because the cynic can't hear the poet's voices from heaven, he concludes there is no heaven!

Shakespeare, the supreme poet, once settled this when he had Hamlet say to Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Well, let me correct that. He didn't settle it for all cynics for all time...just until that night when the cynic needs to dream a much larger dream....

WHY ME.....?

Thornton Wilder wrote an award winning novel "The Bridge of St Luis Rey." In it he told the story people have been living and re-living in every corner of the globe in every generation of time. The ancient story of: Why Me..?

It is the tale of an old Inca rope-bridge abruptly collapsing over a deep canyon, and of the different lives that were lost and were saved on that fateful day. Writing in 1927, Wilder examines the question men and women have been asking before and ever since: Why am I still here and they are not? A question that haunts both the survivors and the loved ones of the non-survivors. Be it a sudden airline crash, ship sinking or fatal disease.

Wilder allows the readers to decide for themselves as he traces the inter-woven tales of that day. The question is not all that different than the same one wrestled with my Abraham, Moses, Paul. Or reflected upon by historians of assassinations like Caesar, Lincoln, JFK, and Martin Luther King. Or prayed about by shocked parents, lovers, widows.

These fateful split-seconds in history -- when some survive and others die -- are often studied by experts of the incidents and the times. Still, the only expertise that seems to count is the slow, agonizing wisdom that emerges among just a few of us who've been left behind. Of that, even Wilder could not find the words....