A word about saving

"To save" is one of those wonderful English verbs that can get our minds churning in different directions. It lends itself to ambiguity, double-entendre, and even punning. It's worth thinking about words from time to time.

We can "save" our money; that is, we can put it somewhere (under the mattress, buried in a coffee can in the back yard, in a bank ... all of which yield about the same rate of interest) so that we have it later. We can save our dessert at dinner and eat it later. Saving, in this sense, has to do with keeping something for later use.

We can also "save" a drowning man, or block a field goal and "save" our team from defeat. In other words, saving, in this sense, has to do with rescuing someone or something, preventing it from being destroyed, preserving it in some way. There is an overlap, of course, with our money (or desert) example: spending our money or eating our dessert now means we have destroyed it (perhaps in a very good cause) and not preserved it.

However, "save" can also be used in the sense of "redemption". It is said that Jesus saves, that we can be saved from our sins. Granted, this has an aspect of preservation as well. For the Christian, his or her soul remains unharmed, will a lost soul will be tortured for eternity. (After all, what choices does a Loving God have for those who insist on disobeying?)

The thoughts I have been expressing for the last couple of posts fall naturally into the second category above: keeping things from being destroyed. When considered seriously, we see that my last posted question: "What's worth saving?" pretty much answered itself: not a whole lot. Our money is broken; our financial system is broken; our economic system is broken; our society is broken; our communities are broken. Our relationships are as run down as is our infrastructure. So, when I start wondering about what is worth saving, well, the answer is rather obvious: not much at all. I don't know about you, but when I find broken things lying around, I tend to throw them away. Our consumer goods are generally not worth fixing, and we've taken this wonderfully wasteful model and applied it the rest of our lives as well.

Our political, economic, and social structures are in such a state that we certainly don't want to bury them on a desert island like so much treasure. They've pretty well lost their value. What is a political system worth when the individual has nothing to say? What is an economy worth when only a tiny percentage benefits from it? What is a society worth when its is based on fear and loathing of "others"? They are in such disrepair that we can't prevent them from being destroyed. We've already destroyed them, which is why they are no longer the treasures that we once thought they were. And Lord knows, we can't keep them from going to Hell. In fact, for a growing number of people, they have become Hell itself.

Whatever we do decide to do is going to demand of us courage. We've pretty much got to start over and that means from a state of maximum uncertainty. I'm not sure how good we are at that anymore.