22 December

Just finished watching the Christmas M*A*S*H episode with my son, Fred, where the whole camp ends their Christmas celebration by singing Dona Nobis Pacem, after which new casualties are delivered by ambulance and Father Mulcahy says, "When you are moving from one disaster to the next, the trick is to just keep moving."

Although I don't work in a mobile army surgical hospital at the front lines of a war, Father Mulcahy's statement touched me very deeply. I do kind of work at the front lines of human disaster and misery, and some of the things I hear, see, and witness at the suicide clinic are so far down on the rungs of the ladder of "human" behavior that I can hardly believe it. And it seems like we are fighting a war that can't be won, because for every patient we finally send home, another one comes in with more pain, grief, and tragedy in his or her life than I care to think about.

I understand perfectly well that people don't come to our clinic when life is good, and so, of course, we witness the consequences of human depravity at its worst, day after day. And I understand that there is just as much good in this life as there is evil, and probably a lot more good than evil. I have, however, come to understand more clearly than ever before that we ought to make every good deed, every act of kindness and benevolence, every moment of patience, every act of service and unselfishness, every smile, every word of praise -- all the good people do every day -- we need to make them count even more by taking notice of them very actively, by noticing and acknowledging them in our hearts and in our minds and in our responses to those to perform them.

And we need to perform them ourselves.

So we just keep moving. And although we obviously can't win the war against evil, we can win the battle for good. This is not a contradiction in terms.