When your child is sick, you don’t really sleep. You listen even as you doze. "Was that a cough? I’ll just check on her again." You lay down on the floor next to his bed. I remember the night when we thought one of our children had spinal meningitis: the high fever, the stiff neck, the frantic rush to the emergency room. Don’t lecture any parent about responsibility for their children when they are sick. Parents worry all the time about their children’s health. They have to in this American society, because apparently nobody else is worrying.

It is a sick society that would cause a frantic parent to pause in that rush to try to get medical help for their child and have to think about whether they will have to choose between paying the mortgage or paying for the hospital visit. Half of all bankruptcies are caused by catastrophic illness in an uninsured or underinsured family. Wouldn’t you sell everything you own if your child had cancer to buy the best treatment, just to see your baby live and grow? What kind of a society makes you face that choice?

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“Accomplices? Addresses? Meeting places? You hardly hear it. All your life is gathered in a single, limited area of the body…” Thus Jean Amery, a Belgian resistance fighter, described his torture at the hands of the Gestapo. He went on to write, “The one who is tortured is altered in this fundamental state of being human forever. Whoever was tortured stays tortured.” Amery eventually committed suicide.

Torture is a consummate moral wrong because it destroys all who participate in it. Torture degrades the human dignity of the tortured, the torturer and the society that authorizes torture.

The reason torture is morally wrong is because it destroys the human soul. The soul is the human capacity to have a truthful relationship with yourself, with others and with God. In a theological sense, it is the source of “human dignity.”

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Many people think that forgiveness is about the person or people who have done a great wrong. Can THEY be forgiven? But the great secret of forgiveness is that it is about the person or people who have been wronged. Forgiveness is the path to freedom from being dominated by the harm that has been done to you or to those you love.

When you have been grievously harmed, those who hurt you in the past can continue to have control over you. They can dominate your thoughts, your fears, your whole life. Forgiveness is about letting go of the control they have over you. Forgiveness is letting it go.

This is the important lesson that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission taught the world. The victims of the horrendous system of apartheid decided not to let it control their future as it had controlled them in the past. They put it down. They demanded the truth be told and thus illustrated the biblical injunction that “you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32) The truth allows you to let go of the harm and in letting it go became free from its total grasp. This work is never fully done and it is a process rather than a once-for-all kind of total release, but it is very real.

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This Thanksgiving you may not be able to end the war in Iraq, bring about reconciliation among the world’s religions or solve ethnic strife, but you can definitely get yourself down to the local homeless shelter and feed somebody. The best way to give thanks on Thanksgiving is to give of yourself.

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This question reminds me of an SAT-type problem: “What do these four names have in common?” What Clinton, Craig, Swaggart and Paulk have in common is power, lots of power. Sexual misconduct is not so much about the sex as it is about the fact that power corrupts.

A profound sin these people have committed is the abuse of power, their unfaithfulness to the public trust that comes with being in positions of power. Conservative religion always wants to focus only on the individual and private transgression and ignore the massive issue of the betrayal of trust that is the result of the sexual misconduct by a public figure.

If you confine the issue of the behavior of these four men to whether "sex outside marriage" is sinful, you miss a deep wrong that is being perpetrated. When a public person deceives and dissembles and is ultimately caught and exposed as a hypocrite, a great part of their sin is in the infidelity to the public trust. Thousands and even millions of people are let down and disillusioned. It is important to underline, however, that this is by no means to disregard the fact that it is sinful on their part to betray the trust of those with whom they are pledged to be in an individually intimate and committed relationship.

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