Upsetness about the existence of the monarchy in Great Britain manifested as a certain kind of rejoicing over the death of Queen Elizabeth II, continues apace over on Twitter. I was scrolling in the desultory way that I generally do in the late afternoon, waiting for people to be ready to get in the car and be driven across town for whatever it was, and I came across this interesting tweet:
You might as well watch the video. It is a young woman who, like so many of us, is “struggling” with her weight. Just to refresh your memory, “struggling” is the Christian word for failure. I myself am “struggling” with my weight, which basically means that the scale reads consistently higher than I want it to. I feel for this young person. She is stuck in that same predicament that so many of us are.
The question is Why. Why does she weigh too much? She provides a pretty lucid answer—White People. If White People, she explains, didn’t go looking for spices, then places like India and Africa wouldn’t get discovered. And if they didn’t get discovered, then the East India Company wouldn’t have gone to the Indian Subcontinent. And if they didn’t come, the fertility of the land would not get destroyed…I mean, obviously, you have just to watch it, it’s not that long.
So anyway, as I said, I feel for her, because none of us can eat bread. Whoever “they” are, they have destroyed wheat and made it malnutritious, rather than nutritious, and I, for one, would be really happy to figure out where to apportion blame. That this young person has figured out who her enemy is, only puts her slightly ahead of the game.
But really, I do like this video because it isn’t often that I come across such carefully reasoned linear explications of sin and its various consequences. The trouble with being human is that we all wake up in the morning and set about to do Good Things TM. I, for example, never wake up and think to myself, ‘What bad thing can I do today?’ I’m just not that sort, and neither are most people. It is only a select few really really wicked people that embrace their own wickedness very first thing as they pour the water over their coffee grounds. The rest of us are trying to do good. The problem is that in “Doing Good,” because the heart is deceitfully wicked and no one can understand it, because no one is actually good except God, the very effort of doing good brings about the opposite of what we desire, which is Bad Things, like making most of the world fat and also sick.
Her illustration is impeccable. Those poor soddy Europeans, chewing their way through their bland, horrible, boiled mutton wished they could make it taste like something. And some of them went traveling and discovered beautiful lands where the food tasted lovely. And they discovered that they could make a bunch of cash by hauling all those spices back to their cold, dark, miserable hovels. In fact, I’m sure they told themselves that it was For The Children. Plus, they wanted gold and such like so their castles could be warmer and more comfortable. They were doing what all human people do, trying to make life better. But look how it turned out for them. They are now the absolute byword amongst the nations. The consequences of their various pursuits—innocent and wicked both—is that they must confess and repent of their “Whiteness.”
This is the way that human striving works. We want to do good, but our efforts bring us to naught. Take the very invention of TikTok. I’m sure the person who thought it up wasn’t trying to be bad, and yet, observe what he hath wrought (not to assume anyone’s gender…). For indeed, TikTok is a scourge upon our land. It is making the minds and the hearts of the young as vapid and useless as all the bad wheat in America. It is too awful. It is such a shame.
Gosh, I wish there were some way for all the efforts of human people to be changed from chaff into wheat. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some way for human people to confess their sins—known and unknown, things done and left undone—and be forgiven? And not only that, for the consequences of those sins to be unraveled?
Imagine, if you will, a Person who was able to take all the infirmities, the unintended consequences, the shame and sin, the ruin and disorder, the poverty and the malnutrition, the violence and degradation all onto himself and actually get rid of it. Wouldn’t that be amazing? And then, just bear with me here, imagine if that Person had the power to reconcile people together, whatever their color, whatever their ethnicity, binding them through time and space into one family. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Or, I guess we could all just keep doing it our way. That’s still working well.
I gotta go on my long walk so that I don’t keep getting fat. Have a nice day!
Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
