Heath Ledger

This is the way we learn the news these days: I was on facebook this afternoon, when my friends' status reports started showing lines like "Bernie is devastated that Heath Ledger is gone". Not knowing where Heath had gone, I checked the news and found out that he'd been found dead from a suspected accidental drug overdose.

I mentioned this over dinner with friends, saying that while his death was a waste, so is the death of every young person. TC noted that lots of people died of drug overdoses in Chicago today, they're not in the news, but they are every bit as valuable as talented rich actor.

This drew TC, Wendy and I out to a broader discussion around 9/11, which of course has shaped the American psyche (though not the psyche of every American) so much. While it is sad that 3000 people died in New York that day, it is equally sad that thousands of people died in Africa on 9/11, and 9/12, and 9/13....

My response to 9/11 at the time, and still now, is that it didn't change the world, it just exposed westerners to the violence, tragedy and fear that so many of the poorest in the world live with every day. Wendy thought that this was a rather harsh and unpastoral response, given how strongly many Americans felt it. TC said he refuses to mourn or recognise 9/11 as tragedy, because we don't recognise the death of the world's poorest in the same way. Which took the conversation further beyond just the commensurability of life, to the question of why we value the lives of people who look like us or share a nationality with us (not talking about people we actually know, which is understandably different) over those who are out of sight and out of mind.

I don't think I'd fully reflected on this until now. But I think the pastoral response is not to say "you can't grieve Heath Ledger / Sept 11 victims" because we don't grieve for everyone equally. I think it is to take our shock and/or grief as a starting point, acknowledging it, and then extrapolating from the particular to the general, to then say, "there are many others in the world who have suffered / died in the same way, let's reflect on them and the value of their lives too". The death of the famous (as long as we don't dwell on the Anna Nicole Smith train-wreck life type voyeurism) probably is a great tool to bring each of us to take pause, to ask "who else died today that I didn't hear about", and to enlarge our hearts with compassion for the suffering which we don't see.

Heath Ledger died today, sadly. But so too did 1500 people in Congo, of disease and malnutrition, half of whom were under 5 years old.

So read http://www.smh.com.au/, with all the colour photos and tributes to Heath, by all means. But scroll down the page, the to single line without a photo under "World" which reads "Congo war claims 45,000 victims per month" as well.