Lent: A time for reflection on “how I’m doing” on this road to spiritual perfection.  Oops, not so good it appears.

The body of the young man who died on the Oregon coast when the tsunami hit washed up on shore last week.  It was the first time a human face had really been put on the story, and once again I was reminded how quick I am to judge, though it is rarely my place to do so.  To be a judge in the legal system, I would presume, one has to consider all the  relevant information available and make a decision to the best of her ability.  How often in daily life do I have even a small percentage of the relevant information at my fingertips let alone all, and yet I judge anyway.

In this case, my first reaction was cyncical: “Oh well, Darwin’s Law in action again.  What kind of idiot would go out to look at a tsunami?  Duh.”   However, here is a fact of which I was unaware:

The time the surge was predicted to hit the coast, 7:30 a.m., had passed.

“As far as they knew, it was all over with,” Jon Weber said. “The wave came in and that was it.”

Oops.  Ok, even if I wanted to push the issue and say any idiot would figure that there would be really really big waves before and after the time the tsunami was expected to hit, there is one fact I failed to consider.

Jon Weber was the young man’s father.  Surely he felt our collective judgement about his son and how that must have compounded his already unspeakable pain.  My sons like to hop around on rock formations high above the ground.  How would I feel if one of them fell and I heard via the grapevine that comments were floating around the web on how stupid it is to defy gravity in that manner.

He was just a kid.  He made a poor decision and paid for it with his life.  Who am I to judge him?

My friend Terri, an extremely intelligent and compassionate woman, grew up near the California coast.  She related to me once how as young people they would stand on the cliffs overlooking the ocean when the wind was blowing strong, spread their arms out and lean into the wind.  Their assumption was that the wind would continue to blow at that speed and that they would NOT suddenly be leaning in mid-air with nothing to stop them from bouncing down the side of the cliff to their deaths on the rocks and pounding waves below them.  Young people see themselves as immortal, death is something that happens to old people in good time.  You don’t have to be genetically inferior on the Darwin scale nor necessarily stupid to do stupid things, especially as a young person.

When I was a kid growing up in a Catholic community, and someone young would die, the adults would comfort us by saying the person was so loved in God’s eyes that He took them back earlier than usual.   Who am I to say that’s not exactly true – that the young man had fulfilled his purpose on Earth and had been a vehicle for teaching us – not just that we shouldn’t go standing at the ocean’s edge anytime before or after a tsunami, but that we shouldn’t go standing in judgement just because we know we would never do anything so stupid.

Or would we?