Soul Food -- Michelle Marr

“Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring

forth.”

Proverbs 27:1

Instead say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.”

James 4:13-15

Maybe I haven’t been paying attention enough, but it seems to me that

this New Year season has been light on predictions and resolutions.

Few people I know seem to possess much confidence about what tomorrow

will bring. Many seem to be foraging through the past year like survivors

rifling through the rubble of their homes after an earthquake, searching

for a certainty they once possessed, but now in shreds beyond

recognition.

I’m putting it down to the pall of Sept. 11.

My friends with children want certainty for them: the child who will

no longer open the mail, fearful she will get anthrax; the child who

calls home from his dorm to ask if his mother can send him a gas mask;

the child who won’t visit her pediatrician in a Newport Center high-rise.

One mother tells her child that anthrax is very rare and very hard to

get.

One mother doesn’t tell her child what she is thinking, that if things

get that bad, a gas mask alone won’t be much use. One mother tells her

child the Newport Center tower is as safe as her two-story home, hundreds

of floors shy of catching the attention of a plane-wielding terrorist.

All are haunted by feelings they are lying to their children. Will

tomorrow be better or will it be worse? They do not know. And they are

resentful that they don’t know.

I have a friend, who with her childbearing years running out, still

hopes and prays to have a child. Another friend is appalled.

“Who,” she asks in full cliche, “would want to bring a child into a

world like this?”

Our world, our world here in America, is surely different, surely

changed, since the events of Sept. 11. But is the world? Is it so much

more horrible than the world in which Herod slaughtered thousands of

innocent children to protect his crown?

Is it a world more wretched than the world crushed beneath the boots

of Stalin or Hitler? Worse than the world bathed in the blood and ash of

the Jewish Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide? Worse than the watery

death of Pearl Harbor or the fiery death of Hiroshima?

Among my and my husband’s friends, I have seen seven babies born since

Sept. 11, all girls. Would their parents have wanted to bring them into

the world if they could have seen what was coming? I think so.

One baby girl is the daughter of a woman who came very close to being

on American Airlines Flight 11. Two of her colleagues perished on the

plane. Born just days before Christmas, her daughter will be called

Victoria, as though in defiance of the evil done that day.

We live in a world where good resides next door to evil, where life

dwells alongside death. Those things we cannot change.

But we can choose life, when the choice is ours. And we can choose to

do good and not evil. That choice is always ours.

For the rest, we must trust Providence, and say, “If the Lord wills,

we shall live and do.”

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

michele@soulfoodfiles.com.f7