Could the world have gotten better news than all 33 miners being pulled to safety today? All day long I kept hearing reports: two have reached the top, half are now out, they expect to have them all up by . Facebook status updates applauded each success. Apparently even the president is watching.
We love these stories, stories of human courage and salvation. And it is that love--not the stories themselves, but the way we love them--that convinces me that we as a species truly have the capacity for incredible goodness.
I thought the same thing at a visit to the Chicago Ethical Society a couple of weeks ago. No miners were pulled to safety there, but I had the chance for a wonderful conversation with members about human dignity and worth, about human kindness. Person after person, they recalled stories of people who helped them carry their luggage in foreign countries, taxi drivers who brought them to their hotel and waived away the fare. What I marveled at was not the stories, which happen all the time, but the way that the tellers cherished those stories. They were reminders, for them, of the goodness of humanity.
Then came the story from the Holocaust survivor. He lost his entire family in the camps, walking to Switzerland as a boy. And he spoke about the kindness he found there, about the people who took him in--"me, a boy, who had nothing to give them!"--who fed him and cared for him and sent him to university. I never lost my faith in people's essential humanity, he told me.
This is true faith. May we all believe in it.
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