Caterwauling

All anyone wants is to be heard.

I’ve been away from the blogosphere during my time of tumult and turmoil (I know the words are synonyms, but it represents how everything happens en masse), so it’s taken me awhile to plow through everyone’s feeds. And via the always-empathetic and -insightful Lachlan, I learned about 300 letters to God being sent up shit creek. Literally.

“Letters to God end up in ocean, unread”

“The letters — about 300 in all, sent to a New Jersey minister — ended up dumped in the (Atlantic) ocean, most of them unopened.

“The minister died two years ago at 79. How the letters, some dating to 1973, wound up bobbing in the surf is a mystery. …

“Many were written by anguished spouses, children or widows, pouring out their hearts to God, asking for help with relatives who were using drugs, gambling or cheating on them. One man wrote from prison, saying he was innocent and wanted to be back home with his family. A woman wrote that her boyfriend was now closing the door to her daughter’s bedroom each night when it used to stay open, and wondered why. …”

Now, I personally would have sent them to PostSecret, but then again, I’m not an asshole. Why do I point that out? Because the guy who found the secrets is gonna sell ’em on eBay. Class-ay.

Around every corner is an opportunity to do the “right” thing. Even if you repeatedly blow past these moral speedtraps, if you will, some of them just reach out and bonk you over the head. I don’t know what the right thing to do with the letters would be — we’re not God; we can’t answer them. Goodness knows we’ve all got a few thoughts of our own that we’d love to have acknowledged in some way.

But I wonder whatever happened to the people who wrote them. (The story says half of the notes are not salvageable due to water damage, so we’ll never know who they are or what they requested prayer for.) Did they go on to heal from the particular trouble they’d sought guidance on? Did they think someone was listening?

IS someone actually listening?!?!

I’d like to go on the theory that it doesn’t take some man of the cloth to be a conduit to spiritual guidance. I’d like to think that “mind over matter” isn’t just some hippie hogwash — “love one another” and all that jazz, and the world will be fine. “Golden Rule,” blah blah blah we shall overcome our dilemmas and dramas.

Some people play air guitar — I’m sitting here thinking in “air quotes”!

The good (we hope) minister took the burden of these unopened secrets to his grave, and I wonder if he got some sort of karmic comeuppance for that. In any event, whomever set sail to the bag o’ secrets (as it seems to have been done recently and Dude’s been dead for two years) has an interesting story to tell.

Did they intend to set the secrets free? Most of the letters were unopened — was it the mysterious third party who read a few and wanted to keep these confidences sacred in some way? Or were they hoping someone would find these unbottled messages and do something about them?

I hope everyone who wrote saw their suffering abate. I hope everyone’s mental loads throughout the world can be alleviated in some way, if we’re going to go the humanitarian route here. In the grand scheme of things, I’m sure this was no big deal, but to sell these secrets is a horrid, wretched way of tempting Karma.

Of course, in my experience, the worse things get and the uglier the things that happen are, I always, always get a silver lining of some sort. ALWAYS. Karma may be a bitch, but I can cite many instances in which she’s played fair and rewarded me commensurately. Retribution isn’t mine to mete out, for She holds the scorecard in a game to which only She knows the rules. But I trust Her.

Which leaves me to conclude that if our letter-writers didn’t get the grace they were looking for, I believe the fates must have smiled on them in some way and brought them some sort of resolution or good luck next time around.

And in that, the world is turning as it should be, and will continue to do so.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 11th, 2006 at 1:42 PM and is filed under Existential Meanderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.