Christmas night, it clutched the light, the hallow bright

This last week I felt so much. For most of the week it was disgust with the haters on the Wear Pants to Church Event. I thought the event was a little convoluted from the beginning but the more I read the reactions of the zealous, the misunderstandings skewed sixty directions like a many-pointed star, the energy of judgmental indignation, the banal blathering of churchy platitudes over and over and over again, seeming to have completely absorbed what I see as transparent, cobwebby excuses, the more revolted I felt. It was infuriating. I didn’t engage, but I read like a crazy person and read Jonny the “best of the declines” out loud until it started making me dizzy sick and effectively (for now) made me feel loath to engage in conversation about anything related. This is my tribe?

And then yesterday…there were some fb updates about another school shooting, but I didn’t realize until I was listening to the radio on the way to postpartum group that it was little children, that it was a kindergarten class. I thought of 5 year olds in their little hats and little mittens, talking about Christmas at breakfast that morning, and how frightened they must have been, how they must have hurt. Their poor parents who were waiting at the fire station, who thought their little children were still alive, and no one came running. Their families brought Christmas presents for them, maybe already wrapped, and Christmas morning will come with those kids missing and nothing will ever be okay again. It’s too brutal, it’s too horrible. I’m so sorry! I started crying in the car, I couldn’t stop thinking about their bewilderment and the hideous pain their parents must be feeling. I don’t think I would want to survive if someone hurt my Lolly, if he were gone, just gone because someone decided to harm him in the ultimate way. I don’t know what I would do that first night, how could I bear him being gone? So much trust, sending a kindergartner off to school before they understand any of the ugly. As I was crying, a white dove flew past while I was at a stoplight. I couldn’t help noticing how beautiful it was and the gracefulness of its body as it flew. I thought, how can this exist at the same time I’m listening to someone talk about murdered kindergartners? How can there be a dove in this same world? Everything was so fiercely contrasted yesterday. The life and vitality of my little boy and even the little girl who we don’t know yet squirming under our hands. Being able to speak with and touch the people I loved. Chai’s violent affection with the postpartum kids. The Christmas music playing on the radio seemed so haunting. I kept crying all day. It was frustrating to see so many posts on facebook crying for gun control and announcing their plans to homeschool. Don’t you get it? Those won’t save you, nothing can save you, they are only illusions of control. We just hope and hope that we’re not in the building when the bomb goes off. That a predator doesn’t pick us or our little ones, but picks someone else. That we’re not in the lane when the car next to us loses control, that our bodies don’t turn against us, that we make it through without becoming victims. Those with intent to harm and nothing to lose will find a way to do it. There is no deserving, we are all so vulnerable. Ransom captive Israel.

That night we went to the MoTab Christmas concert with David, Laurel, and my parents and there were so many moments that were merry and jovial and fun. I kept wanting my mind to relax and go to this Christmas place where I could just enjoy and feel like a happy child and believe none of it was real. But instead, everything lovely and powerful about the concert seemed to highlight the pain and loss of innocence. For me, every moment of the concert was about those kids. Alfie Boe was amazing and even the cheesiest song he sang made me sob: “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” Little children who should be home, who should be safe and loved, who will never be home again. I kept thinking about the parents who would give anything, anything to have those little ones home for Christmas like they should have been, but now they have this grief to carry around for the rest of their lives. When he sang “Bring Him Home” it destroyed me, and I’m sure many others there felt similar emotions. It was so beautiful and so heartbreaking. I felt that the room was reverberating with grief. It felt good to participate in a moment of silence with so many hundreds of people; in a wretched way it felt good to shed so many tears from deep pain in my heart.

I don’t know if I can say that I’ve suffered for this, because what is my suffering if I cry holding my little boy safe in my arms? Yesterday I told him that someone had hurt some kids and that I was so sorry, and that I would try my best to keep him safe, but that I was scared. He looked at me solemnly with his blue eyes, touched my face and said “Soft!” which is what he always does when someone is crying. I’m just so sorry, I am aching on behalf of the families. I keep thinking, that’s exactly the way I should feel. In the midst of it I felt disgusted with myself because cognitively, I know that so many children suffer from even darker horrors every day, something like 21,000 children somewhere in the world greet death every 24 hours, but I don’t weep every day for that. I grieve for what is laid out in front of me, what I am most heavily forced to witness, hear about or know of. What does that say about my compassion? Today I forced myself to acknowledge that many times when I have spoken of a relationship with Jesus Christ, my own or encouraging others to create one, my ideas have been centered on avoiding pain, taking off the edge of the hurt, filling a troubled heart with comforting images that speak of a purpose in the madness and chaotic anguish. Isn’t that exactly what Marx meant by an “opiate for the masses?”

I read this on CNN’s belief blog: “Some religious leaders argue that modern American life insulates much of the nation from the kind of senseless death and suffering that plagues much of the world every day.“Most of the world, for most of the world’s history, has known tragedy and trauma in abundance,” wrote Rob Brendle, a Colorado pastor, in a commentary for CNN’s Belief Blog after this summer’s deadly shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which left 12 dead.“You don’t get nearly the same consternation in Burundi or Burma, because suffering is normal to there,” wrote Brendle, who pastored congregants after a deadly shooting at his church five years ago. “For us, though, God has become anesthetist-in-chief. To believe in him is to be excused from bad things.”

I'm wandering in this quagmire of my own privilege. Most of the time I am cheerful and I love my life and my family and I laugh and listen to music and even grant myself ample space to feel sorry for myself often. What I typically perceive as painful is such a light stripe. I don't think it is moral to use God as a way to be "excused from bad things", but even as I express that I know I haven't really known "bad things," so how sincere can my mourning really be? I keep thinking that maybe what I was meant to understand from Jesus is that I was NOT meant to numb out because of assurance in a divine plan, but I was meant to weep and weep hard. I’ve written blog posts before about the saddest things and I usually ended them tied up with balloons of hope, but today allowing this to float away on some naïve imagined string of reconciliation seems too heavy in and of itself. I just want to say that I’m so sorry, for the lonely boy as well as the lost children, and that I’m grateful for my life and for having experienced as much love as I have. I don’t want to anesthetize myself anymore. And after my eyes clear, I will remember the dove.