The Impoverishment of Tragedy

A few weeks ago, I attended an Eschatology Conference where Dr. Sharon Baker of Messiah College (PA) spoke of a "Hospitable Hell." She explored the meaning of divine justice and did a thought experiment how Holy Fire might be used to purify all of us, come judgment day, so that we might all enter into the Kingdom of God. It made me think of tragedy and how we as a society and culture have lost our ability to tell a good story, be it a tragedy or comedy, because we've so much of our worldview separates "us" from "them."

Tragedy itself was perhaps most celebrated in the past and lamented in the present by Nietzsche. And I think he's onto something, when I look at our modern forms of tragedy/comedy (those eternal twins, or two sides of the same coin). Just one example, "Meet the Parents," casts a family against the groom-to-be, and we the audience laugh at Ben Stiller's misfortunes. We may identify with his situation, but we're spared the consequences, laughing at him rather than with him. We watch people suffer, in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib or Darfur, but while this knowledge is readily available, action is lacking. The distance between our heads and our hearts has never been further.

A character's "tragic flaw" is tragic precisely because the origin of his or her downfall lies within his or her self. Yet all too often we are prone to divide the issues into black/white, good/bad, righteous/evil, without recognizing that both sides are found on the spectrum of human life, and each life is a microcosm of society. Perhaps our tragic flaw is our inability to recognize that we have a tragic flaw, that as humans there are logs (let alone specks) in our eyes.

As you advocate, forgiveness (not punishment) brings about repentance. May we forgive ourselves and our own societies, repenting of the sin of allowing others to suffer or go down to hell, and not realizing that our fate is bound up in theirs. Their lives matter just as much as ours - to think less of them is to say that they don't matter as much, and therefore our actions to help them don't matter as much, and then we're all too prone to give up on the connection and let them (and thus ourselves, as we're all bound up in this together), perish.