Beyond the Headlines – Sunday, December 08, 1985
There was a time when a man knew his neighbors, when all the people in a village or hamlet were called by their first names; a time when births and deaths, sickness and good fortune were passed from mouth to mouth, house to house, until all reveled in the joy or grieved in the sadness.
And when the church bells published the news of some departing soul, all stopped to ask for whom the bells tolled; the plowman in the field brought his team to a standstill to count the rings, which toll the age of him or her whom death had taken from them, alike the housewife at her bread, the carpenter in his shop, the blacksmith at has anvil—all deciphering the mournful message of the bells: one knell—a baby, stillborn in the house by the mill; a dozen tolls—a young boy has drowned in a boating accident; four score—and the soul of the venerable hamlet judge has winged its way to heaven.
But that was then and this is now. Our modern world is larger, more complex. The printed and electronic news media have replaced the bell tower. We know more about what happens in our world, but distance separates us from the emotional impact of tragic events. We sit quietly in the comfort of our armchair and read the headlines: half a world away a volcano has swept a few dozen villages and twenty thousand inhabitants from the face of the earth. Or we watch on the screen as starving children huddle together to wait for death’s calming mercy. Then casually we turn the page of the newspaper or flip the TV channel to catch the football scores or amuse ourselves as make-believe actors, perform make-believe tragedies, on a make-believe stage.
And so, on we go, informed and enlightened, but untouched by the news: such and such is dead; we hardly knew him. A town we’ve never been to with a foreign sounding name has sunk beneath a sea of suffocating mud, without even a bubble rising to tell its drowning pang. A distant nation of remote peoples whom we’ve never met starves to death for want of bread.
But there at the scene, where headlines turn to life, some heart has sunk under the weight of the news, a heart close to the misery and death, close to where the tragic news is distilled, to where each ink blot of the printed news and every inch of video is baptized with some mother’s tears, close to where every last sensational image represents the agonies and dying groans of living men and women.
May God grant us the empathy to see beyond the headlines: to comprehend more than names and facts; to translate grief-laden news into human terms—making each casualty our neighbor, and every victim our brother.
December 08, 1985
Broadcast Number 2,938