What Is Safety?

Content Warning: This post mentions the drowning of a child.

I recently heard a homily from Father Joey Evangelista of the Missionaries of Jesus.

He told a story of Lin Lin, an 8-year-old girl in a remote Tagakaulo village in the Philippines, who drowned in a river traveling home from school.

When I first heard the story, I got angry.

I had finger-pointing thoughts like:

“That’s why people shouldn’t tell kids that school matters more than anything!”

“Why would people want to endanger their children by sending them across an unpredictable river to go to school?”

Then the Holy Spirit, I believe, brought me some new thoughts…

Perhaps for the Tagakaulo people, arguably “everything” in their lives would be seen as prohibitively dangerous to many Westerners such as myself.

Maybe in the lives of the Tagakaulo people, the risk of danger is so present that to avoid it would be to not “live” at all.

Like not going to school.

Oh, the Western inclination to pad ourselves with safety!

Maybe Catholic brothers and sisters from remote, humble, non-Western areas, upon visiting Western cities would think that “everything” in the lives of the Westerner is prohibitively dangerous spiritually?

Going to certain movies…listening to certain music…going certain places on the internet…wearing certain fashions...

Allowing ourselves to slip into secular distractions with no pushback, while they fight against earthly elements that can kill only their bodies and not their souls...

“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Matthew 10:28 NRSVCE

Maybe a Catholic brother or sister from a remote, humble, non-Western village would fear that to put a child in a Western public school, sanitized of religion, with omnipresent internet-connected devices, would be “too dangerous” for a child?

Nevermind the river.

How humbling.

“Even God cannot fill what is full already. We must empty ourselves so that God can fill us.” Saint Teresa of Calcutta