This past weekend, I watched the movie Schindler's List. Now I realize that I am about 14 years behind everyone else in seeing this movie, but that did not lessen the profound impact it made on me. I had not seen it because I knew that I would be deeply disturbed and saddened by watching it, and so everytime I was in the video store and considered renting it, I would put it off. Now in the days of renting online, I had it on my online list of movies so that it would eventually just be mailed to me, and I knew once it was that I would in fact watch it. Needless to say, I was deeply disturbed and saddened by watching the film. The weight of carrying around the renewed knowledge of the evil of which humanity is capable throughout the weekend was horrible. And yet I believe in the importance of being reminded of that fact from time to time. It is dangerous to forget what we are capable of perpetrating or simply ignoring when we do not want to face evil being done in our midst.

A couple of things struck me in the movie. One was the hatred of the general population for the Jewish people - yelling names at them, throwing dirt at them or spitting on them, things that are violent without necessarily doing actual physical harm. I was struck by the way that the general population cooperated in dehumanizing a group of people. Even those who did not actively persecute them simpley ignored their suffering and did not protest their treatment. Obviously there were exceptions who did protest, many at the cost of their own lives. But it made me wonder, who do we dehumanize and demonize in our society? The immigrants? The Muslims? The poor who live in our inner cities? To what extent do we ignore their suffering? To what extent are we culpable for the conditions in which we live?

Oskar Schindler was not an extraordinary person, which is actually what makes the movie so profound. He was a person like you and me, living his life, not wanting any strife or conflict, trying to get along and even enjoy life besides, trying to get ahead. He doesn't start out with the idea that he is going to save Jewish people from the concentration camps. He actually starts out using them as cheap labor so that he can make a bigger profit. He is almost forced to do the good thing, the right thing because he is more and more confronted with an evil that he cannot ignore. He cannot simply stand by and do nothing and be able to live with himself. One of the most moving scenes in the movie, with one of the most important insights for me, is the scene at the end when he realizes that he could have saved more, he could have done more. This scene speaks to all of us - we can always do more. Short of actually sacrificing our lives, we have never gotten to the point where we have done all we can do to fight injustice, violence, racism, poverty, and all of the other forms evil takes in our world. We can always do more. On the flip side of that sentiment is the fact that we have to begin by doing something. If all of the people living in the Nazi occupied countries had done something to help, to protest, how much of a difference might it have made? We can start with something small, but we must start. That is the moral imperative of our religious belief, of being disciples of Jesus Christ. I want to leave you with a quote from theologian Elizabeth Johnson in her book Consider Jesus:

There is a traditional axiom which claims that to live a good ethical life one must "do good and avoid evil." The emphasis shifts today, slightly but very dramatically, to make us realize that this is not enough. In fact, it can end up being a shirking of responsibility. For in the light of the compassion of God revealed in Jesus, we must "do good and resist evil." There is a call to the Christian conscience here not to hide our face from evil, not to walk around it, or pretend it is not there; but to face its massiveness in spite of our feelings of powerlessness or insignificance and to become involved in transforming it.