Here is a sculpted scene that might get the attention of people today, maybe especially these Black Friday through Cyber Monday shopper-days. Notice that this frenzied couple don't have even one foot firmly planted on the ground. Notice that the shopping cart is filled to overflowing, so much so that it takes two to move it. Maybe it's more the Shopping Cart of Life.
The children are panicked and stressed. Dad is anguished as he points ahead to the more. Perhaps he is calling to his wife, "I want my children to have everything I never had." The boy holding onto his mother's leg seems to be craving her attention. Do you sense the mom would prefer to be freed of these children who are slowing her down? The man is so crazed and inattentive he might crush the two real birds that are right in front of him. The stone is gray: a colorless scene, a window into the violence of the First World.
Thomas Merton wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:
"There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs; activism and overwork. The rush and the pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
Truth be told, Merton likely wrote this from his own personal experience. While he was a Trappist monk and hermit, he received many guests into his hermitage, traveled to Alaska and the Far East for conferences and was in constant communication with scholars, theologians, activists, poets and religious personalities. This doesn't mean he was a hypocrite in writing what he wrote, but perhaps he understood better than most. No one is immune to this contemporary violence. Even a monk can fall prey.
