Chain baby pictures

The chains are far reaching in my email.

This morning I got a new one, a pithy invitation to be a better person, love my neighbor, forgive the people I'd like to see dead or maimed, speak up with courage, seize the day (carpe diem for you Latin lovers), forgive myself for everything (including how I will ignore the guilt-producing words to send this back to the one who sent it to me (like Santa Claus checking it twice).

I think we've totally lost it with the Internet email chains. Cute baby pictures (no African Americans among them, and one half-Asian child passed the litmus test) don't motivate me to be a better person. Most of my bad behavior is with my own husband (as opposed to yours). I wake up to my better angel when I remember that he doesn't put the lid down (you know what lid I refer to) because he was many years in the Navy and there were no girls around and we raised two sons and the "seat" was never put in the covered position. I was outnumbered.

When I let that go and move on, I'm a better person. No email chain will assuage my conscience of my everyday bad behaviors at home.

Chain Letters on the Net

I'm moved to address why chain letters trolling the internet are so difficult for me to pass along. I just received one from a dear friend whose way of life and way of thinking and giving of herself to the world I have long admired. But...I cannot pass along the Mother Theresa prayer she just sent that has the obligatory addendum to send it to eleven others including herself and see what happens in four days. There is an implied message of a miracle on the four day horizon.

I have never found out what would happen in four days. The three or four times out of the thirty or forty opportunities I've had in the past five years and have mostly rejected, I can't recall anything good or bad. But where I do feel bad now and have always felt is in breaking the chain. What four day miracles have I aborted for others, including the ones who have so naively sent their chain letters to me?

The question is this: Is NOT answering the call to passing along the prayer a deliberate F-U to faith, to the spirit of Mother Theresa, to the spiritual forces in the universe that make good things happen to good people (like me?). And the alternative: is not passing along the Mother Theresa prayer an omen of an ill-fated happening around the corner or of the current state of unrest in my life finding a permanent home and becoming a curse, an irreversible curse that will leave me in unrelenting doom?

What if something good happens to me in four days, something spectacularly good (I inherit $10 million from a relative I didn't know existed) What if something truly bad happens? (I will not give an example; I'm superstitious). Does any of this have anything to do with the Mother Theresa chain?

The fact is maybe I'm a latent existentialist: I've been pretending to be a person of faith, but I'm really just a spectator.

Last night I was with a group of friends discussing the nature of courage against the fear of failure. Unfortunately, all the examples of courageous heros from the last two centuries have been assassinated: Lincoln, Kennedy, King, Gandhi. I have the incredible hubris to think that if I courageously step out of my box, I'll be assassinated. And that's worth pondering. But Mother Theresa died of old age. Ooops, Maybe I can still retrieve that chain prayer and figure out which ten friends I would offend by sending it along.