Each human life is unique and precious. Every human being embodies an entire universe of possibility, potential and value.
Catherine Corbett, a young police woman is run down in a hit and run incident as she was trying to arrest people suspected of fraud. Fraud is about dishonest gain, cheating others for something that could never balance the loss of a human life, or the crushing of human possibility.
One fire fighter is dead and three others missing in the aftermath of a huge fire almost certainly an act of arson. The act of fire-raising is intentionally destructive, whether from stupidity or malice, but either way it endangers human life unnecessarily, at times with tragic consequences.
There is a bleak nihilism laced through the substance of our society. It manifests itself in a failure of moral imagination, that capacity to envisage the human consequences of actions, so that restraint, accountability, compassionate responsibility, the essential public duty of valuing and protecting life, simply do not register on the moral radar. The tragic irony is that those people who serve the public, like our police force and the fire service, who put themselves in the way of harm to protect the public and preserve human life, by doing so demonstrate precisely those qualities of moral imagination – holding themselves accountable, showing compassionate responsibility for others, acting out of public duty. They are too little valued in a society too easily taken in by the superfluous, the trivial, the transitory, the self serving, the greedy grabbing for advantage – and a society too neglectful of those who, while also part of that same society, have made a vocation of caring about precisely those human consequences of other people’s actions.
Tonight I pray for those whose sense of pride in the courage and conduct of their loved ones, only slightly lessens the leaden weight of loss. May they know the comfort of God, whatever that might mean for each of them
Tonight I pray for those whose actions have led to the loss of lives, and the breaking of human bodies. May they recover that moral imagination essential to personal moral responsibility; and then may their remorse open them to the possibility of restorative justice and a future in which one of the consequences of their past actions might be future acts of recreative hope.
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