Ashley Madison and Germanwings

This is a two - part post.  Here a brief thought from earlier this year that I did not publish at the time.

Depressed Morality April 17, 2015
Today I have been taking in the enormity of the Germanwings aircraft crash, in which, it now seems, the co-pilot locked the captain out of the cockpit and flew the airplane into a mountainside at full speed, killing all aboard.  The cockpit sound recorder carries the steady sound of the co-pilot's breathing and the screams of the passengers just as the airplane hit the ground.
     Subsequent reporting reveals that the co-pilot had been suffering for some years with bouts of depression.  Of course lots of people suffer with bouts of depression without intentionally murdering almost 200 people - men women and children.  It seems to me that something else must have been happening in that man's mind.

Now for a more recent musing - Ashley Madison
The Ashley Madison website for married people who are seeking to commit adultery, or at least play with the idea - was always reprehensible to me.  So I  don't feel any sorrow for the 33 million people whose identity has been revealed in the recent hack and Internet-publishing of their client base.  What has surprise me is that they had 33 million paying customer. The NYT reports that only 3 zip codes in the USA did not have payin Ashley Madison customers - two is Alaska and one in New Mexico, all are tiny towns with sometime intermittent Internet connectivity.  Wow.  What does this tell me?  Some commentators write that this is another fruit of the individualism and the metaphysical-sexual fulfilment culture that is the zeitgeist of our culture. I agree.

I'm not making any further connection between the Germanwings mass-murder and Ashley Madison, except this - that in both there is the assertion that the need of the individual trumps the needs of the 'other'.  That pilot was surely mentally unwell - and just how and in what way, we will never know. What we do know is that he chose his own perceived and immediate needs over the very lives of 200 people.
 Surely those who act out their need for further sexual excitement than their marriage currently provides, are engaging in deeply selfish short term thinking that will reap deep and long lasting pain in the very souls of their spouses, parents, children and friends. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

I yearn to ever more become the sort of person who embodies a deep, loyal, empowering, dignifying presence not just in my own self, but in the community and families that I am a part of.  More and more I see this Christian life as shared.  Truly no person lives alone. Our lives are not our individual fiefdoms, they are a shared and deeply connected organic life in which sin never affects just the sinner, and love never can be contained in just one soul.  Both ripple through the connections that are the essential us.

I acknowledge the darkness, sin and dysfunction that remains in me, a work-in-progress, a sinner saved by grace and currently being sanctified by Christ.  Inside me is a little piece of the Germanwings pilot. Inside me is the potential to be in the Ashley Madison shame database. There is no them, only us. Thanks be the Christ, the author and sustainer of our faith, our life, our hope.