Abbey-Roads2

From a homily sent to me by my Bruderhoff  buddy in New York:

A few years ago I viewed a public service advertisement on  television. Produced by an alcoholic rehabilitation group, it was intended to awaken people whose families had become dysfunctional because they were denying a self-evident fact, namely that someone in the family was an alcoholic and the unwillingness to acknowledge it was distorting, indeed ravaging, domestic life.

In the ad a family is relaxing in its living room. The father reclines in an easy chair perusing the newspaper.The mother sits on the couch sewing. A little girl watches TV. All of a sudden an elephant enters the living room and begins to upset things with almost every move. By the time the ad concludes, the family’s world has been turned upside-down. The father’s easy chair is tipped over, he is sprawled on the floor, his glasses are broken but he continues to try to read the newspaper. The mother lies on the couch underneath a busted lamp struggling to re-thread a needle and the little girl peeks around the elephant in order to watch a now crushed television set. However, in spite of this shattering breakdown in community life, no one is capable of speaking the plain truth: “There is an elephant in the room and it is ruining everything.” 

All continue to ignore the obvious. Like people myopically concerned with properly rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, everyone’s attention is entirely absorbed by incidental tasks which would be proper and right except for one terrible fact: there is an elephant in the room. This fact transforms these otherwise acceptable activities into dead-end escape routes from truth and reality. Said spiritually, good loses its goodness when it is permitted to become the agency by which evil is left unnamed and hence is allowed to engulf an ever greater area of life.

- From: “The Man Who Chose To See”