Have you ever thought about what it would be like to watch lemmings in real life? Just take a moment and really visualize what that would feel like. The mass of bodies, surging, striving, one after another in a wave of flesh. Pushing. Driving. They crash towards oblivion, certain as a tide, but never understand what lies ahead. Or do they? Which is the greater horror: running towards the cliff blindly, trusting the one ahead of you, or doing with full knowledge but unable to deviate from the path laid out before you?
Humans are unique among all the creation in our ability to consciously plan and predict. Other species may act with foresight at times, perhaps from sheer instinct, perhaps not, but they primarily react. We are proactive. So what happens when a person walks knowingly into disaster? I had two students who were not going to pass one of my classes last semester. Both knew it was too late to do anything about their grade; they’d made their respective beds and ignored multiple attempts at intervention. Yet one showed up for her final anyway, while the other just walked away, never looking back. The latter saved himself a morning of grief. The former did not. It’s not as though she studied hard to try to at least nail the final and preserve her pride. She admitted she was poorly prepared and bombed the final nearly as badly as most of the rest of the course. Why?
There are those who face their death willingly because they do so for a purpose. In 1943 the four multifaith chaplains aboard the torpedoed Dorchester troop transport ship, priest, reverend, pastor and rabbi, gave up their places in the lifeboats so that others might live. They joined hands and sang as they sank. They faced their fate with conviction. What about those whose deaths serve no such clear purpose? What about the lemmings? The countless troops who mounted pointless charges into a hail of musket balls in wars that would never have the slightest bearing on either their lives or the lives of their children? The guilty man walking under his own power down death row? The two-years-clean addict who knows she has one more binge in her but not one more recovery but pulls the tourniquet tight anyway?
When I think of lemmings I hear Damien Rice’s song “Cold Water” and place myself among them, drowning in the cold Atlantic and wondering if the hand I imagine clutching mine is real or a figment of my imagination, a symptom of the rapidly closing hypothermia, and if I am lost. I drift away and go cold, o lost and by the wind grieved ghost, come back again…
The song fades and is replaced with another, Mumford and Sons’ “After the Storm.” I imagine the lemming moments before that leap, finally seeing his future, the cliff ahead, and moving from the dream of a beautiful hill covered in flowers and grace to a realization of the hugeness of death and the smallness of his own world. I hear the words, “scared of what’s behind and before“, and see the drive to the edge in all its multifaceted wonder and horror. Then, and only then, does the dream return. The lemming embraces the dream, the hope in a time when there are no more tears and love drives out fear and grace and flowers bloom once more. I hope the grace of that vision comes to all those who face impossible situations and pray that might find the hand to hold in the darkness.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtgQ2AjBbGI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZMUgZRew3w
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