Both Heroic and Wrong
Evil situations can bring out the best in us, but that doesn't change the fact that the situation was gravely evil.
Quick thought for today, and I’d be grateful for your prayers, since the reason for “quick” is that I’m at a record level of sick where even typing is a problem. (Should be short-lived, but still: Prayers are greatly appreciated. Thank you! UPDATE: You guys are the best. Within an hour of putting out the request, pain in my hands was basically gone. I’m back to being a happily-typing-away person. Amen.)
Here’s the thought:
More often than not, the situations that give rise to heroism are genuinely evil situations.
Usually this is obvious and we have no difficulty comprehending it. Sometimes, though, we don’t see things quite clearly. I was thinking first of my husband’s grandmother, the one I mentioned Easter week. She told the story of being six years old and rising to the challenge of picking a hundred pounds of cotton a day.
That is wrong. No six-year-old should have to do that kind of labor. We can admire her heroic virtues; we can recognize that her family was in an impossible situation and accept it for the reality they had to deal with as best they could; we can even be grateful that in the face of the relentless pressure to survive that many good things came from those grueling years being formed in the school of suffering. But there is nothing good about small children having no choice but to engage in arduous labor in order to ensure their own and their family’s bare necessities of life. Things can be wrong and heroic at the same time.
The crucifixion of Jesus is another example of something both wrong and heroic. Torture is intrinsically evil. Innocent men shouldn’t be put to death by angry mobs and weak-kneed bureaucrats. Did that particular death result in the best thing ever to happen to humanity? Sure. But it was still wrong, gravely wrong.
I know most of you reading know all this. But I spell it out because I’ve encountered people who genuinely struggle with this question. They struggle with it when contemplating difficult moral questions, and they even struggle with it if they take time to consider the reality of the crucifixion.
So. Mini-lesson for today in helping people parse out their thoughts about complex scenarios: We can recognize that good things arose from a bad situation, and we can rightly laud heroic actions without in any way denying that the heroism was only necessary because some kind of evil was afoot.
Icon of St. Michael the Archangel, public domain, read more about it here.