Self-inflicted Wounds

Deacon Tom Writes,

“Self-inflicted Wounds”

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Today’s readings begin with Job’s lament. He has lost everything: his family, health, fortune, and friends. He is living in misery; he has cut himself off from God and given up hope. One would have to look far and wide to find an equally pathetic creature under the sun, we might think. But how wrong we would be! Several years ago Sojourners Magazine, an inspirational magazine that carries articles where faith, politics, and culture intersect ran an article with the title, “Ending the World’s Most Savage Cruelty.” Gets your attention, doesn’t it?   

The article’s lead story is on the subject of global human trafficking. When it comes to suffering and misery, we have outdone ourselves!‼  The exploitation of women and children for the sex trade, child labor, and child soldiers is simply beyond comprehension. The torture and torment know no boundaries. Antislavery activist Siddhartha Kara in his 2010 exposé Sex trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery wrote these haunting words. “I experienced no emotion more devastating than peering into the eyes of and enslaved human child. Where one expects to see the spark of innocence, one discovers instead the abyss of humankind’s most savage cruelty.”

“More girls have been killed by violence or neglect in the last 50 years precisely because they were girls.” Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas Kristof and Sherryl WuDunn report in their acclaimed Half the Sky, “than men were killed in all the battles of the 20^th century.” http://globalsolutions.org

Not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but more than a million children are living the nightmare of torment and torture as sex or labor slaves or child soldiers today….

Sickness and disease have plagues humanity from the beginning of time and have been the cause of much of our suffering. But this horrific evil - the sex trade, like war, poverty, ignorance, and so many other crimes against humanity, we bring about ourselves. We are the master designers of the misery and the suffering endured by the innocent….because our greed, our depravity and our perversity is without limit but surely not without notice. How often we hear the Psalm, “The Lord hears the cries of the poor.” In a world so fallen from grace, we must ask ourselves, “What is God asking of us?” and become engaged in being part of the solution. A first step is to become aware of the problem. To that extent, I hope this article accomplished that. The rest is between God and us.

Have a super Sunday!!!

Deacon Tom