Keeping the Faith in a World Gone Sideways

Good guys do wear white

I created Suffer Lab to study how we can grow while existing within our own challenges, particularly the ones we create for ourselves as with exercise, mild deprivation, or changing course in our lives. I did so with the understanding that most of the audience had the material and spiritual resources at hand to seek out episodic “low-end” suffering which makes us more resilient over time.

Then there’s high-end suffering. We don’t seek it out — it finds us and it’s often terminally dangerous. But we can still study it from a distance and pull some lessons from what we see. Some of the most clamorous chapters in modern history provide a wealth of lessons and insight into the vastness of human resolve. To wit: the French Resistance during World War II or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in America during the 1960s. And in recent years, just when you were starting to lose faith in our species, we have a burning ember of humanity where you’d least expect it: Syria.

I’m talking about The White Helmets, or the Syrian Civil Defense. Like me, you might have heard of them in periphery of news broadcasts only to become truly acquainted with the full reach of their efforts after the eponymous Netflix documentary took home an Oscar.

Most of us enjoy a professionalized first responder enterprise whose purpose and sense of duty is without question. But my sense is that most of the expertise in this field in Syria has been killed off or has fled, leaving the task of rescue to volunteers who (in the case of the documentary) previously worked as tailors and blacksmiths, among other trades.

It would seem counter-intuitive that in the chasms of such hell we would find people who will drop everything and run straight into the lion’s jaws to dig others out of rubble and render aid regardless what side they’re on. Syria gives every impression of a hopeless situation socially, politically, and spiritually. There is no end in sight, yet volunteers don their white helmets and jock up as soon as the first bomb hits. Surely they’re in the stranglehold of fear as they dash toward uncertainty, but their focus — their duty — is to save lives.

Watching what’s going on in Syria is hard because it’s gruesome and resembles a wicked problem in world politics. Does it take such catastrophe for mankind’s most basic instinct to kick in where one man will hang it all out to save another man, woman, or child?

What greater example of fealty toward mankind does one need? How much easier would it be to seek revenge, foment radicalized hatred, or to simply die-in-place? The White Helmets are a giant middle finger in Death’s ashen face and it’s uplifting to know they’re out there.

My friend Josh once explained to someone that faith doesn’t mean living in certainty of something. Instead, faith is to live in the uncertainty of that thing, yet still give yourself over to its existence. The White Helmets have been stripped of their loved ones, their livelihoods, and the rule of law yet refuse to surrender their faith in the value of human life. My own faith in humanity is buttressed when I think of this altruism and I am reminded of the smallness of my problems.