Still With The Story?

Zack was glad to stop in at the parsonage the next evening. He liked and respected the Pastor, and he had grown spiritually a great deal under his strong and sensitive preaching. They exchanged a few pleasantries, and then the Pastor said what he had heard, and he expressed his concern in a kindly way.
Zack said, yes he was doing that, and he believed he was following the commands of Christ.
"I guess there were three people, more than anyone else, who got me to thinking about this," he said to the Pastor. "And two of them were in our church. The first was Mr. Toosma. You remember him?"
"Of course," the Pastor nodded. "The economist who spoke here on Layman's Sunday."
"The thing I remembered most about his sermon," Zack said, "was his saying that loving our neighbors as ourselves obviously entailed guaranteeing our neighbors an income large enough to live on. I know he said it when he was talking about tax reform. But it seemed to make a lot of sense to me, and I thought it had to apply all over if it applied at all. I knew there were a whole lot of people in the world who didn't have enough to live on. I began to wonder if I did love them as much as Jesus said we should. And what I could do to try to help them live."
"But did you ever think, Zack," the Pastor said gently, "that maybe you're taking Toosma too literally? Maybe you need to give him a little room for rhetoric, and interpret him a little more reasonably. After all, I don't think he's starving, is he?"
"No," said Zack, "I don't think he is starving. But I don't see what that has to do with me. What he does is his own affair, or maybe his and God's. I really mean that. I don't want to criticize him, but it was his argument, not his example, that struck me. Could I really love my neighbor in the Sahel, and know that he was starving, and then go ahead and buy a rump roast for myself at the A&P?"
Zack paused, but the Pastor said nothing now, waiting for him to finish. So Zack went on, "The second person was John Phillip, the Christian editor who spoke to the men's fellowship a while back. He told the story of a Christian leader who couldn't eat his egg one morning when he was a guest in a South American home, because he noticed the children of the house staring at it. He realized that his hosts had saved the egg for him, but the children were hungry. And he couldn't eat the egg because he was so tender-hearted. He had to leave it for them. And then Mr. Phillip suggested that when we sat down to eat we might try to imagine the poor and the hungry standing by the table, looking at us. And then, he said, we could send some money for the relief of the poor."
And now Zack looked intensely at the Pastor.
"You know, I tried that, and I could do it. I really could imagine the black African from the Sudan, the Indian child from Ecuador, the starving woman from Bangladesh still holding her dead baby, all standing beside my table as I ate. And I thought that if they were really here I wouldn't eat it all myself. I'd at least share it equally. Of course, they weren't really here--only in my imagination. But they really do exist and they really are starving, this very day. They're not here. But does a thousand miles, or two or three, really make all that much difference in what we ought to do?
"And then the third man was Garret Hardin."
The Pastor looked puzzled. "Who's that?" he asked.
"Hardin is a biologist," Zack said. "I haven't ever seen him, but I've read a little of his stuff and something about him. As well as I can get it, Hardin thinks that the United States and a few other countries are like lifeboats in a sea full of drowning people. If we try to take everyone in, the boat will be swamped and everybody will drown. The only thing to do is to leave most of the people in the water to drown. That way the people who are in the boat will have a chance to survive. So, Hardin says, the U.S. can't feed the world. If we try it then the population growth in places like India will soak up everything we send and demand still more. We'll be drained till there's not enough left to do any good here or there. The only thing to do is to let starvation take its toll in other places while we try to get our own lifeboat into some safe haven where maybe we can start over."
The Pastor looked more doubtful than ever. "That sounds pretty hard-hearted to me," he said. "Is this man Hardin supposed to be a Christian?"
"I really don't know at all," Zack replied. "A lot of Christians, and some other people too, have criticized him for being hard-hearted as you say, or selfish, or something like that. And maybe he is hard-hearted. I don't know. But what really attracted me to his thought was that he seemed to be more hard-headed than most of his critics."
"How's that?"
"Well, most of the people who criticize Hardin seem to be just assuming that of course we can have just about every nice thing there is, with only a few adjustments. If we just ate a little less beef and a little more chicken, or if we just got rid of a few mean people in the Department of Agriculture or the Du Pont Company then we could have a comfortable life here and we could eliminate poverty everywhere else and things would be fine all over. But mostly, it seems to me, they believe things like that just because they want to, or maybe they couldn't stand it to believe anything else. But Hardin talked seriously about the possibility that we may really have to make hard and tragic choices - that there is going to be pain and sorrow and starvation no matter what we do - but that our choice may have a little effect on how much there is and on whom it will fall. It seemed to me that he was willing to stick his neck out and make a hard choice and acknowledge it. And I thought a Christian ought to try to be at least as hard-headed as that. So I said to myself that maybe Hardin is not. And if he's right and there aren't enough places in the lifeboat, then what side of the gunwale am I going to be on? In the end my own decision for myself is different from Hardin's, I think, but I learned more from him than from most people."
Zack was getting a little steamed up. He had been pretty pale lately, but his face was flushed now.
"That's why I couldn't get interested in anything like the weekend conference on Alternative Life Styles that the Inter-Faith Coalition sponsored last month. Somebody was coming in overalls to conduct a workshop on how to live comfortably on $33,000 a year. But I already know how to live comfortably on $33,000 a year. And if I didn't know how, I could just set a budget of thirty-three thousand and stick with it and I'd learn soon enough. But while I was living comfortably I'd know that around the world some of my neighbors were still fighting to survive on maybe $100 a year, or even less. And so what good what it be?"
Zack leaned forward, hands gripping the chair, staring at the Pastor. For a moment his intensity seemed to surge out, filling the living room. Then he sagged back, the passion ebbing from his face, his hands relaxing.
"Anyway," he went on, "I put the three of them together. The love that Toosma mentioned, Phillip's imagination, and Hardin's hard-headed lifeboat. I imagined myself in the lifeboat, and I looked out and saw my neighbors in the water. The waves were green, but the black heads and the brown heads were everywhere in the waves. Maybe it was God who gave me a love for them - I suppose it was. The lifeboat bobbed up and down in the swells, but it was dry. But in the swells some of the heads would go under and then they would come up again, glistening wet and gasping. Some of them went under and did not come back, and after a while I knew I would not see those faces again.