we do not know the things that are for our peace

 

Samia Ahmadi, right, whose father and fiancée were both killed on Sunday in a U.S. drone strike on a house in Kabul, Afghanistan. Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

        We live in crisis, and perhaps we find it interesting to do so.

Yet we also feel guilty about it, as if we ought not to be in crisis.

As if we were so wise, so able, so kind, so reasonable, that crisis ought at all times to be unthinkable. It is doubtless this “ought,” this “should” that makes our era so interesting that it cannot possibly be a time of wisdom, or even of reason.

We think we know what we ought to be doing, and we see ourselves move, with inexorable deliberation of a machine that has gone wrong, to do the the opposite. A most absorbing phenomenon which we cannot stop watching, measuring, discussing, analyzing,  and perhaps deploring!

But it goes on.

And, as Christ said over Jerusalem, we do not know the things that are for our peace.

-Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 66

Crisis:

a time when a difficult or important decision must be made.

"a crisis point of history"

synonyms:

critical point, turning point, crossroads, watershed, head, moment of truth, zero hour, point of no return.