Suffering on the Small Scale

Last week I left my sunglasses in my morning class. I like these glasses; I splurged and spent 35 or so bucks for them, on sale, at a sailing store. To me that's an expensive pair of glasses. I announced today that I had left them on the chalkboard in the morning class and did anyone see them?

This afternoon, after my announcement, I find my sunglasses, in urine, in the men's urinal on the same floor, around the corner from my office.

Beauty, eh.

Both classes that meet in that room (I have it for two classes in a row) have seen me working hard in the class lectures, prepared and passionate. The response seems positive. The discussions good. We haven't even had a graded assignment yet.

Sometimes the problem of evil looks awfully like idiocy.

Comments

Sandalstraps said…
Wow.

I wonder why we are often so randomly destructive in our youth. I live across the street from a park, which is right by one of the two major local Catholic high schools. After a big football game, too often the park - sacred public space - is the victim of the random desecration of teenage angst.

Each time it is vandalized I help clean it up. While my neighbors mutter curses at the kids who spoiled our local treasure, I remember an event roughly 13 years ago (I think I was 14) when, lighting off fireworks with my brothers and a friend at about 3 am, I accidentally burned down a park picnic shelter.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that there is nothing we despise in another which is entirely absent from ourselves. When I hear stories like this one, I remember that I, too, have participated in such random destruction. But for the life of me, I have no idea why.

Augustine used stories like this to speak to the universality of the fall, but I'm not so sure it makes such a nice, simple, theological point.
5:46 AM
Tenax said…
This is a wonderful and refelctive response, Chris.

My wife pointed out it might have been a sexual fetish, which got me laughing so hard I got over most of the pain pretty quickly.

t
4:04 PM
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