Sad

So, this morning I was watching “The Morning Show” on the local Fox affiliate and I saw one of the saddest features I’ve ever seen. Sad, not because of what was going on, but because of why it had to exist and what it said about the current state of things.

The feature began with a 17 year old whiz-kid who is currently a college jr. studying aerospace engineering. This is not sad and not why he was on the show. The reason for his appearance was that he came up with a website for finding unknown half-siblings for people who need donors for various organs, etc. Again, on the surface this is not sad. Sure, it is unfortunate that organs fail and people suffer while looking for donors, but this is part of living in a fallen world and the very fact that we can transplant organs is reason to celebrate.

Even the website itself was not in itself sad. It is a great idea, one that could help many people. There are reasons why people may be estranged from their half-siblings that have different degrees of sadness related to them. Couples who have turned to artificial insemination for one reason or another may raise children with half-siblings that they never know. Children who came through the adoption system for any one of a number of reasons may have half-sisters or half-brothers (or full-blown sisters or brothers) that they never had the chance to meet.

What was sad about this feature in particular was the cheerful reunion that they hosted on the show. The audience was introduced to a family consisting of a mother and her two children, a girl and her big brother. They were raised never really knowing the “man” (I use the term purely in a biological sense) who impregnated their mother. Through the use of this website the teenagers discovered that they had two other half-siblings, one living in Delaware, the other in Ohio.

Oh, happy day! New brothers and sisters!

Here’s the rub, mom didn’t know either. And the new sibs were just about the same age as the two teens. Again, we turn to the “man” who was not present on set, not talked about and not present in the lives of any of these teens. Sad. What kind of a world is it where a “man” can act in such a way as to leave offspring scattered across several states, from three different women in a relatively short amount of time without any of them knowing each other? How can someone completely disengage from their own progeny to such a degree that they don’t even keep in touch with their mother - that they don’t even know that there are other children in the situation? Furthermore, what does it say to a child who has to turn to a website to find out if they really have brothers and sisters that their parents haven’t told them about? You want these kids to trust their parents (or anyone) when this bombshell drops on them? Sad.

*Where are all the good men dead; in the heart or in the head?

...don’t know or don’t care.
A solid argument can be made for death in Everyman’s head. In some ways we are spoiled. Anything I want to know I can google - why remember anything? There are thousands of opinions out there, why create and (gasp) defend my own position? Why read, think or debate when I can watch pillow fights on my local news? I know there was a time when the internet didn’t exist (I’m old) and I imagine there was a time when people had to find other things to do besides watch the “boob tube” (not that old). Was there some magical age, before the internet, before TV when people delighted in reading and thinking and debating and writing? A more likely explanation is that there was a time before the internet and TV when people found other distractions to spend their time on that involved as little reading and thinking as possible.

On the other side of this coin, is modern Everyman dead in the heart? Hmm. What does it mean to be dead in the heart? Certainly this is a different condition than having a broken heart, as the implication that a heart is broken leads one to believe that the heart is alive enough to be hurt. It seems likely that a broken heart can lead to a dead heart (I’ll suggest that a broken heart can also resurrect a dead heart, but that discussion is for another time). But the reality is that it is something much more dastardly that leads to a dead heart, something much more sinister.

It’s not an easy thing to kill a heart. It doesn’t happen in an instant or a single moment, it takes days, months, years. You can’t take it out in one shot, it takes many blows, one on top of the other, pounding and pounding and pounding. But even then its not the heart that is heart by these blows, its deeper than that. These blows don’t kill the heart, they weaken the spirit, This is where the real trouble begins. See, the heart can’t be killed from without, only from within. A heart dies when someone decides that they’d rather feel nothing at all than feel that pain anymore. So, the spirit and the deceitful mind get together and beg the heart to give up, to throw in the towel. They come to the soul and argue that they don’t need the heart anymore, they can get by on the shadow of pleasure given by the flesh and the mind. So the heart, hurt and dejected, dutifully slinks into the background, lessening the pain, but taking joy and love with it as well. Eventually the spirit and the mind convince the mind that this is how things should be; calm, peaceful, familiar, and even keeled, running like clockwork - like a machine. Seeing them content, the heart is left in the shadows, to collect dust and rust solid, dead.

A steady onslaught of blows, reigning down in the form of greed, pain, sorrow, mocking, rejection, lust, anger, sloth, idolatry and gluttony. What kills a heart? Sin. From outside and from within. Sin studies it, stalks it, seduces it, surrounds it, and suffocates it. Calm, cool and calculated, it works in such a way that the man doesn’t even know what’s coming, he may even welcome it.

But one day, one day the man realizes that he’s become hollow - he has a solid, protective (tin) exterior but nothing inside.

There are plenty of good men out there in this position, not realizing how they became hollow, not knowing where they lost their chests.** Most horrific of all is that so many don’t know that there is a (THE) way back, that their hearts aren’t dead, just sleeping. The head isn’t dead because of TV or the internet, its dead because of motivation. The mind is reinvigorated when passion is re-ignited. The mind needs the heart like the heart craves relationship with its maker.
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*Shakespeare by way of Grosse Pointe Blank.
** "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful." -C.S. Lewis