Notes from Bodymore, Murdaland
When you walk through the garden, you gotta watch your back
Well, I beg your pardon, walk the straight and narrow track
When you walk with Jesus, he’s gonna save your soul
You got to keep the Devil down in the hole
He’s got the fire, people he’s got the fury at his command
Oh, you don’t have to worry, hold on to, hold on to Jesus’ hand
We’ll all be safe from Satan, when the thunder, when the thunder starts to roll
We got to keep the Devil, keep him on down, down in the hole
-theme from "The Wire" *
song by Tom Waits
Last weeks' posts included the recent murders of Stephen Pitcairn** and Milton Hill. One victim was white, the other victim was black. One victim was two days shy of his 24th birthday, the other victim was 70. One man had applied to Med School at the University of Florida, the other man was retired.
One man was Presbyterian, the other belonged to The Ark Church.
One man died from a stab wound after surrendering his iPhone, backpack and wallet. The other was shot to death for his scooter. One man wanted to find a cure for breast cancer. The other man volunteered at his church.
Nothing at all indicates the two men ever met in life.
Of course, in a city where the most popular underground video is called "Stop $%#!ing Snitching, Vol. 1," the murder rate can be tough to control. - www.Murder-Ink
Especially for Baltimorgue, a city infamous for logging a murder a day throughout the year, public outrage was surprising. The outcry for "Something to be done" was measured daily on the local nightly news for over a week ... at least until both victims were buried and laid to rest. Although superficially opposites, each man represented our best hopes and our highest aspirations. Yet somehow everything basic and fool-proof went irrevocably wrong. And it happened twice in less than a week.
Both men apparently complied with their assailant(s). Both men handed over their material possessions. Neither man resisted, called for help or tried fighting back. Nonetheless, despite having literally surrendered everything, each man died needlessly, suddenly and violently, without reason, without mercy and without explanation. One man was found in the street and the other in an alley, both left to die alone, amounting to nothing more to their assailants than bleeding piles of flesh for someone else to find and report as police statistics.
In each case it was on the next day that neighbors heard the news and faced an awareness of individual vulnerability ... and heard an inner voice whispering "Maybe next time me, too" ... that caused folks to lock their doors and voice their collective helplessness as a neighborhood outrage that was loudly accompanied by urgent demands for action and for a swift remedy to guarantee their safety.
But it's been like that for a long time here. Anyway, by now the local politicians are gone and the news teams are busy juggling the latest news for tomorrow's news.
That's two more numbers out of 300 or so for the year.
--
- Baltimore graffitiAround 10:30pm tonight I got a craving for Thai and called in my order to a restaurant just down the street. That meant walking four or five blocks by myself along the waterfront and getting back to the marina's locked gate just after 11pm.
What in the world is wrong with you? Why on earth would you take chances like that? For crying out loud! Why are you even living in Bulletmore?
I got back to my boat without incident and tore open my chop sticks soon as I sat down. That food tasted awful good, it sure did. But it didn't stop me from thinking how many people might die between the time I started writing this post and the time you started reading it. [I'm not picking nits or looking for an argument, I'm simply stating a fact: I feel far, far safer here than I did for the 8400 nights I spent where I used to live. No joke. No kidding. Walking the waterfront here, in the second most dangerous city in America, is nothing compared to the 23 years I spent literally afraid to go outside in my own yard after dark, despite being armed and having a 6-foot fence prowled by five Rhodesian Ridgebacks.]
Nor did it stop me from thinking about why people behave, do things and treat others like they do.
In denying both Christ and the enemy's existence, our culture's loftiest visions and greatest social experiments let the devil out of the hole.
--
As believers I don't know where the point lies between being safe and being un-safe. You might be at home right now, locked behind a security fence in a house wired with 24-hour alarms in a gated neighborhood patrolled by security guards. Maybe all those things make you feel safe.
But even as you're reading this, feeling relaxed and ready for bed, could be that the first cell at the end of a sequence of a hundred million other DNA replications before it just separated from the cell that was its progenitor ... except that this one new cell mutated during the process and will be diagnosed in another 20 years as cancer.
Or it could be that a sparkling new airliner, complete with the latest electronic innovations and representing the safest technology available, just rolled out the door of an assembly plant on the other side of the world. Yet a $5 dollar nut securing a turbine engine inside its nacelle was over-torqued during assembly because the guy behind the air wrench was thinking about his retirement package and got distracted, meaning that five years from now that nut will suffer stress fatigue and crack in mid-flight at 29,000 feet, severing the aircraft's hydraulic control lines ... and you'll happen to be on board.
Then also there's the chance that right now, 900 million miles away from earth somewhere deep inside the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a football field-sized rock just collided with an even bigger object ... with the result that a multi-megaton projectile is now zipping along a celestial flight plan scheduled to arrive in your backyard at 8:12PM on February 3 2013 just as you're flipping the burgers on your bar-b-que while you're in the middle of enjoying The Big Game on TV with your friends.
In all three scenarios there's not a thing you can do to know, postpone or prevent the outcome.
--
Unless Christ returns to earth in the meantime, death is inevitable ... for me and for thee and for everyone in between. We can look back over the course of human events and realize each and every one of us is going to die. Because we know death is inevitable, none of us should be surprised or worry about when or where, because despite our elaborate measures and precautions, physical death is already on its way to claim us.
So it doesn't matter how carefully we plan to protect and save our lives. Folks with more money and more power than we can imagine have tried ... and every one of them failed miserably. Christ told us that whoever wants to save his life will lose it.
What does matter is how we serve, honor and live for Christ.
* Set in Baltimore, "The Wire" centers around the city's inner-city drug scene. The show depicts the lives of every part of the drug "food chain", from junkies to dealers, and from cops to politicians. - imdb.com
** During [Stephen Pitcairn's] 90-minute [funeral] service, [Reverend Ronald] Hilliard urged the family not to focus on the tragic circumstances surrounding Pitcairn's death. He suggested that the family may be wondering what would have happened if circumstances had been different.
"We may be sad about the book ending before we were ready," said Hilliard, but that sadness should not overshadow the value and impact that Pitcairn's life had.
"The reality is that in God's eyes, Stephen's life was complete," he said.
Speakers largely avoided discussing the tragic circumstances surrounding Pitcairn's death, instead paying tribute to his Christian faith.
Pitcairn, a researcher at a cell engineering laboratory on the Johns Hopkins medical campus, was on the phone with his mother, Gwen Pitcairn, around 11 p.m. Sunday when he was confronted by a man and a woman in the 2600 block of St. Paul St., police say. His mother listened as he pleaded with the robbers and was stabbed in the chest.
- source "The Baltimore Sun"
We got to keep the devil down in the hole.
