Good Friday - Part II

Chesterton on Terri from The Dawn Patrol:

"The comparisons you posted between the actual events of the last week of Jesus' life and the events of what will probably turn out be the last week of Terri's life are indeed striking. But what has been haunting me all this week is the similarity in the "backdrop," so to speak--the state of the world that led to both events. All this week, I've had a strange, dreamy feeling that I'm living through something very big that's happened before. I don't have any illusions that the death of Terri is going to change the world like Christ's death on the cross. But I feel as though something very deliberate is happening here, as if God were saying, "Now, watch carefully. You've seen this before, and you know what it means."'

"This is what I find most troubling about this whole matter: not that it is happening, but that it is happening HERE, to US. If we were reading a story about Iranian mullahs or Pakistani villagers forcing a woman to starve to death, we'd shake our heads and deplore it, but we'd also secretly think that such abuses are bound to happen among such benighted people. But America today is like Rome was then - the best and highest accomplishment of human beings, and yet it's still not enough. It's failing the test, and in the same way that Rome failed. If 'the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world' is not a fair description of America, I don't know what is, and yet this is where it has brought us. We know what came after Rome; what can come after America, I don't know, but I do think that THIS America is not one that can resist the avalanche that's just started under its feet."