To Stop the Bleeding

Try as I may, I will never understand the selfishness of individuals.

It was night. I sat in a hot springs with friends and watched the stars travel across the night sky. For a moment, I closed my eyes and let myself slip from the consciousness of this world. Suddenly, a loud crack and the scream of a child jolted me from my mind’s wanderings. The noise made me awaken as if from a nightmare. I didn’t rub my eyes and yawn. Rather, as I awoke with a start and a gasp, I saw a young girl lying face down on the concrete at the opposite side of the pool.

I was halfway to standing up and rushing to the child’s side when I saw her parents come at a run. As an undergraduate, I promised myself that I would never sit idly by if I saw another person suffering before my eyes. I would do what was in my power at the moment to stop the bleeding, either literally or metaphorically. In this case, the bleeding appeared to be quite literal. The child must have slipped on the wet cement and taken a header flat onto her face. It was a simple childhood accident, one that I can remember experiencing at least once when I was very young. For a moment, I recalled how scared I was when I, myself, had fallen face-first into the pavement.

As I prepared to jump out of the pool, the child’s parents come to her side and I decided the wisest action would be to let them handle the incident. Nevertheless, I was concerned and deeply moved to compassion by this young child who I will likely never see again. Though my wilderness first-aide training made me cringe to see the mother immediately embrace her daughter and pull her off the concrete, I was relieved to see that both mother and father acted as responsible parents. And as mother carried her child away from the pool, father grabbed a towel and pressed it against the girl’s darkly colored mouth and nose. As the girl cried, the pair carried her into the warm and well-lighted pool house.

When the trio passed from earshot, a middle-aged woman across the pool from me and my friends spoke.

“Jeez,” she laughed, “Am I glad that I’m through with those days! Ugh, kids!”

In a moment, her words threw me from heart-felt compassion to visceral anger. Her words were a means to express the distance she desired to create between herself and the incident. She threw up a defense to separate herself from reality. With those words as a wall, she became one of the proverbial “faces in the window” that do no more than stare out at the suffering and injustice of the world before our eyes.

Instead of thinking about the child, the woman thought about herself. The same scene that had cried to me for action must have glued her to the bench of the pool. I wanted nothing more than to take the pain away and stop the child’s bleeding. The young girl’s screams were like a knife viscerally twisting through my guts. How could this woman say such a thing at the sight of obvious pain? I wondered what she would have done if the little girl had been her own creation? Eventually, as I sat and reflected on the incident, I found myself wondering about God in the mini-drama that unfolded before my eyes.

As a Lutheran, I believe that we are redeemed through the grace of God. As a member of the human race, I believed that we are saved when we stop the bleeding in our world. And as an historian, I’ve read Luther and the great debates of whether or not God saves individuals through works or grace. While doctrines and theories can be argued over for centuries with no answers (as they should be), I’ve found that they often fail to grasp the reality of the world in which we live. Though I believe in the grace of an unnamed creator-artist, such a notion will do little good for the child who lays bleeding on the pavement.

The only way we will survive as a species is if we deny the urge to throw up our selfish walls and idly watch when an incident as this unfolds. We must allow ourselves to be moved by compassion and to act at the sights of suffering and injustice. If we don’t, the human race will surely bleed to death as we watch from our own self-absorbed worlds.

Stop the bleeding. These were the most pertinent three words of moral advice I heard in college. Regardless of religious or moral dogmas, perhaps these words capture what it truly means to be a responsible member of humanity.