Holy Innocents and collateral victims

We have just celebrated the feast of the Holy Innocents. Those were the male infants, two years old and under, ordered eliminated by King Herod in his madness to kill the child Jesus.

In the Gospel narrative, tears flow whenever I read the lines: “A cry was heard at Ramah, sobbing and loud lamentation: Rachel bewailing her children; no comfort for her, since they are no more.” (Lk 2,18)

What instantly came to mind as I went through the celebration was the idea of collateral damage, collateral targets and collateral victims. In this life, we have to be ready to end up like the Holy Innocents, who were the collateral targets and victims together with the child Jesus.

We can suffer and even die anytime because we happen to be beside someone at a certain moment, or we happen to be associated with someone or something, etc. We may not have done anything wrong, and yet we suffer the consequences of what another person has done.

Just think of the 57 Maguindanao massacre victims. Most of them were collateral victims. Just a few were the real targets.

A number of times I had to explain this concept slowly and patiently to people who come with complaints about why they are suffering the consequences of the mistakes or inadequacies of others, like their parents or brothers and sisters, or their friends and colleagues at work, etc.

Of course, we suffer not only because of the mistakes of others, but also because of the good done by others, those good things that have fallen unpopular or hateful in the eyes of many people.

Thus, we can be collateral victims because of both the good and the evil done by others. If we have to convert this into some statistical expression, we can say that the probability of us becoming collateral victims is quite high, and we just have to be ready.

We have to be ready to suffer anytime, to lose all of a sudden our possession, our reputation and, why not, even our life. All these can happen in an instant. You may just be having a good time at home enjoying things with the family, and a stray bullet from nowhere can just hit you and snuff your life off.

So we have to be sporty in this life. Yes, we need to be serious and very responsible, but our human condition is such that in spite of our prayers and efforts, our virtues and best behavior, things can just end up the opposite of what we expected. We have to learn to be open to this possibility.

That’s what being sporty is. We kind of treat our life like a game. We play hard, eager to win, of course. But we can still lose, and if we do, we just have to know to move on. Even if losing means losing our life, it’s not the end of everything, because in fact we have life eternal waiting for us after death.

We can still move on, but we have to move on with grace, not with bitterness and rancor. In fact, we have to learn how to move on with humor that springs from a cheerfulness rooted in our faith and love of God.

St. Thomas More, for example, just before his head was chopped off by the executioner, asked that his beard be moved out of the chopping board, because according to him it had no part of his “crime.”

God is, of course, a judge, but he is a most just judge who knows how to blend justice with charity and mercy. We just have to do our best, with the full force of our mind and heart, of our whole self.

That is what he will look at, and not so much at what we achieved or failed to achieve. He is more interested in our heart than in the products. Is there real faith, hope and love in our heart? That’s what he wants to know more.

Some of us can ask why does God who is supposed to be all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful allow evil to come to us? To that, we can only say that God respects our nature, our freedom, our concrete human condition, but also knows how to derive good from evil.

Even if our capacity to do evil is infinite, his capacity to show mercy is even more infinite. His mercy limits our evil. So we should not worry too much. Rather we have to worry about the real state of our heart.

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