My Mother Made Me (Do It)

"I had a very difficult childhood.
My mother didn't want me.
She was 42 when she had me."

This was the headline news in MX yesterday.

Who spoke those words? Apparently Josef Fritzl, the Austrian accused of locking his daughter in a cellar for 24 years, raping her and forcing her to have 7 children. He is now on trial and this is his mitigation plea.

My instinctive response when I read the article was one of utter revulsion and rejection. I don't need to hear more. Away with him! Lock him up forever and throw away the key!

Now, I have A LOT to say on the subject of parental influence (both the subtle and the overt) and how the desire to please can affect decision making years after the child has grown and is supposed to be able to think and act autonomously.

But I've also come to realize that I have a say in the outcome.

I have a choice.

I don't have to be a victim and to live forever burdened by resentment, regret and anger.

With God's help, I can write a new and better future, and help others do the same for themselves.

Few people are so completely good or irredeemably evil that we can ascribe to them all the good things that have happened to us, or all of our history that we wish had never happened.

Life is a complex, intriguing, mysterious confluence of the thoughts, decisions, and acts of many individuals, each living their own lives, striving for their own desires and not necessarily aware of how they are affecting other people.

Add to this mix those external circumstances over which we have no control, and the hand of God, and one might even start to feel a little compassion for the man or woman who acts in such a way as to repel and repulse his or her fellows.

And yet: at the end of it all, unless we are disabled in mind and so unable to think and reason and choose, do we not still have the choice to stand on the side of good or evil?

What makes some people more prone to hurting and harming others?

Not all criminals come from broken homes.

CS Lewis, author of the Chronicles Of Narnia, writes in Mere Christianity that each day, we make choices that turn us into something either angelic or something devilish. (Great liberties have been taken in the paraphrasing here.)

Do we spend so much of our waking hours consumed with the daily, urgent and evanescent that we choose to ignore that tiny subversive voice that encourages us to think about all the things we would rather not deal with? Like death, eternity, calamity, illness, poverty, suffering, the meaning and purpose of life.

Do we sometimes forget that we inhabit two worlds, the physical world that ends in death, and the eternal one that goes on in spite of death?

Let me know what you think.