Recognizing Mystery

Gabriel Marcel in his The Mystery of Being is investigating into "the essence of spiritual reality" (p.1) -- including in the human person -- in a world of science and technique in which the human recedes into anonymity (p.6), and power, efficiency, technique, and bureaucracy assert their dominance. Marcel wrote in 1949, 1950 against the background of World War II, but the situation he describes is certainly recognizable today, I think.

In such a world where are mystery and presence to be found? Marcel offers as an example, a sleeping child:

"From the point of view of physical activity. . . the possible grasping of things, the sleeping child is completely unprotected and appears to be utterly in our power; from that point of view, it is permissible for us to do what we like with the child. But from the point of view of mystery, we might say that it is just because this being is completely unprotected, that it is utterly at our mercy, that it is also invulnerable or sacred. And there can be no doubt at all that the strongest and most irrefutable mark of sheer barbarism that we could imagine would consist in the refusal to recognize this mysterious invulnerability. This sacredness of the unprotected lies also at the roots of what we call a metaphysics of hospitality. In all civilizations of a certain type (not, of course, by any means merely in Christian civilizations), the guest has been regarded as all the more sacred, the more feeble and defenceless he is. In civilizations of a certain type, I say: not, I might have added, of the type dominated by the ideas of efficiency and output. The more, it might be said, the ideas of efficiency and output assert their supreme authority, the more this attitude of reverence towards the guest, towards the wounded, towards the sick, will appear at first incomprehensible, and later absurd; and in fact, in the world around us, we know that this assertion of the absurdity of forbearance and generosity is taking very practical shapes." pp.216-217.

What was true in 1949 is even truer today, don't you think?

Can't we conclude that it is precisely the vulnerable, and our care for the vulnerable, that keeps us human? When we euthanize the unfit and unwanted, be they born or unborn, haven't we turned ourselves into barbarians precisely because we can no longer sense the mystery inherent in the human being herself, living on this fragile earth, vulnerable and unprotected?