c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ As I prepare for a trip to Italy, I wonder if I will encounter anti-American sentiment there.

Last week a U.S. military court acquitted a Marine pilot whose low-flying plane severed a ski gondola’s cable and caused 20 deaths in the Italian Alps. Newspaper reports said the Italian public was outraged. An Italian official said someone must deserve blame. If not this pilot, then someone else must be punished.

I’m sure the American legal community nodded in agreement. Many careers ride on assigning blame. Even in accidents, someone can be found whose pockets are deep enough to handle blame. Our courts are clogged with people seeking the easy profits of retribution.

Meanwhile, two more military trials lie ahead. If those don’t satisfy the need for blame, there are others to chase: the cartographer whose map didn’t show the cable, the training team who assigned low-level missions, maybe the airplane’s manufacturer. As any target of legal action knows, the chase never ends. Someone must be found who can be blamed. Someone must write a check.

The search for blame often leads back to the victims themselves. An Italian court ruled recently that a woman wearing tight jeans must have wanted to be raped. How else could her jeans have been removed? The standard defense of a rapist in America is to probe the victim’s sexual behavior, to show that she provoked her assailant.

Another well-rehearsed response to misfortune is to look for sin. Jesus’ disciples once saw a man born blind and asked who had sinned, the man or his parents. Even our vastly expanded knowledge of genetics and the random processes of pregnancy don’t prevent a woman who miscarries from asking, What did I do wrong? Those who suffer from addictive diseases like alcoholism still get branded as sinners who deserve their dose of divine retribution.

Some blame God when the storms of life break. God must have a”plan,”they say, which requires this person or group to suffer.

Some search for a scapegoat to carry a community’s blaming. As the religious right retreats from partisan politics, some zealots sputter about an American public that is too ignorant to recognize its own best interests, or too numbed by sin to care. My own read is that the right wing’s politics of meanness and scapegoating couldn’t survive prosperity. Watch for their return when times turn tough and people look for some divergent group or behavior to blame.

We blame, I think, because we can’t accept accident or chance. A blame-free situation exposes us to the fundamental chaos of the universe.

If we can’t blame, then we can’t control. If we can’t punish, then we can’t pursue our deep desire to play God. If we can’t blame and punish, then we must enter the realm of acceptance, forgiveness and faith, and that realm is profoundly unacceptable to us. Go to church _ yes. Join a religion _ yes. Join an angry religion _ even better. But accept not being God, forgive as we hope to be forgiven, believe in a power outside ourselves _ not on your life.

Jesus cut through the ugly fog. When his disciples asked him to explain the blind man’s sin, he said the man’s blindness wasn’t caused by sin, but was an occasion for grace. Not that God caused his blindness, but that God can work in his blindness to give light. He then healed him.

As the Gospel of John understands the ministry of Jesus, this one healing, more than any other single action or word, solidified the opposition to Jesus and made his death inevitable.

Why? Because Jesus violated the fundamental commandment: thou shalt blame. Even if the assigning of blame portrays God as a vengeful demon who meddles in pregnancies, thou shalt blame.

Even if blaming turns us against our neighbor and leads to pogroms, the politics of hatred, and scapegoating, thou shalt blame. Even if blaming raises up a cadre of predators who turn accident into lawsuit and make us more careful than caring, thou shalt blame.

The idea that accidents simply happen, that no one is to blame, and that no one should profit from another’s misfortune, is too frightening.

DEA END EHRICH