Love is bigger. Right?

Like so many others, I have been appalled at the difference in rescue response to the sunken fishing vessel smuggling migrants across the Mediterranean and to the missing submarine off of Canada on a pleasure dive. I wonder at the way in which we determine a person’s worth based on money. But I also balk at the glee going in both directions: the “illegal” migrants had it coming, the “immoral” millionaires just as much.

I am not above I-told-you-so-isms by any means. And I definitely enjoy myself a good nature-as-avenger meme: orcas defending their territory, cockroaches and racoons surviving where human can’t.

But this time, I cannot hold the hatred in my body. It is as if I am getting lost in the many versions of “why.” Exclusion and exclusivity. Survival and self-actualization. Hiding from others and hiding from ourselves. I feel icky about the ways in which we all believe ourselves to have the moral upper hand, when so many are dying either way, every day, unnecessarily. There is a sermon somewhere in this, and I find that I also cannot hold that type of overbearing morality right now. The truth of how we are living together as a community of humans is hard to carry. And I am part of it.

Thich Nhat Hanh often said that the art of happiness also is the art of suffering well. I am sitting with that this morning, knowing that I cannot force its resolution.

There is only sitting. Breathing. Holding all that we are. Knowing that love is bigger. It must be. Right?