The Desperate Cry for Hope
"Our society, our structures, our knowledge and our ability did not and could not offer Noelia hope, because society had nothing to offer her other than the materialistic."
Hope.
It’s the fundamental ingredient to the future of our world. And the question that our legal system and our political system faces is how our society instils and imparts hope to the generations to come.
Life’s great questions of who am I? and where am I going? are centred around hope. There is a fundamental truth to the Biblical maxim that “ where there is no vision, the people perish.”
Last year, the Western world grappled with the tragic passing of Noelia Castillo Ramos. Noelia was a young Spanish girl who endured unimaginable trauma: a vicious sexual assault, the effects of which left her severely mentally hurt and harmed. Due to her serious depression and chronic pain, Noelia was permitted to access Voluntary Assisted Dying.
Our society, our structures, our knowledge and our ability did not and could not offer Noelia hope, because society had nothing to offer her other than the materialistic. The reality is that Noelia was the tragic consequence of a society that thinks it has killed God.
Friedrich Nietzsche famously promoted the notion of the death of God.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
But is God dead? The message of Easter is that Jesus rose from the dead. This message has real and practical consequences for the structures of our society and innocent people such as Noelia.
If God is not dead, then a framework of truth and right and goodness encircles our everyday decisions and points us to a purpose beyond ourselves. If God is not dead, then there is hope for society; there is purpose in the struggle of life.
Blackstone, in Book 1 of his Commentaries on the Laws of England, wrote about the source of law.
“And consequently, as Man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should, in all points, conform to His Maker’s will.
This will of his Maker is called the Law of nature. For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the perpetual direction of that motion, so, when he created man, and endued him with free-will to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that free will is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws.”
There are, as Blackstone says, certain immutable laws of human nature whereby the free will of man is constrained. There is a profound dichotomy here. The existence of God constrains the will of man, and as a consequence, hope is revived in the fabric of society. The innate purpose of man is something beyond oneself, and a hope beyond oneself elicits hope.
The message of Easter tells us that God is real and has incarnated himself in the struggle for human existence. Because He is real, as the old carol so eloquently expounds:
The wrong shall fail
The right prevail
With peace on earth, goodwill to men
Noelia's story is a tragedy, and our western legal system failed her, because we disseminated a message to her that her suffering had no purpose and therefore it was permissible for us as society to lose her. William Blackstone’s understanding of the structure of law needs to be reconsidered by our society because God is not dead, and because God is not dead, Noelia’s passing is a tragedy.
The world needed Noelia. Life may not have been easy for her, but she had a purpose. She had eternal worth.
Remember Noelia. Remember that there is hope, because we are not the ultimate determiners of life.
Hope is the fundamental ingredient that this world needs.
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