Tragedy

Many things are lost for want of asking – An English Proverb

My heart goes out to the family and friends of all the victims of the recent violence that took place last week in Aurora, CO. So much has already been said and written about the event by so many others that I don’t think I need to add my voice to the mix. Sometimes we honor people best through our silence.

In silence, we mourn for those who died; we commit their souls to God.

In silence, we grieve with those who lost loved ones; we lift them up to God, our prayers rising on a flood of tears.

In silence, we wonder why and how we were spared; we confess our guilt to God – even if we don’t know why we should feel guilty for what someone else did.

In silence, we look at James Holmes and wonder just how sick and twisted he must be to have visited such death and destruction on those whose only crime was a desire to see some magic come alive on a silver screen.

With fear and trembling, we leave his fate to a system of justice that is maddeningly slow, intentionally blind, and as likely as not to both crucify the innocent and set the guilty free.

In the face of this – and other tragedies like it – how should we respond? What might God call forth from us at times such as this?

I think a healthy dose of reverent humility is a good place to start, by which I mean acknowledging that there is a God, and that we humans are not him. We haven’t the wisdom, the will, or the power to change what happened or the capacity of people to do evil things.

We are finite creatures. We are sometimes right, but we are sometimes wrong. We are sometimes good, but sometimes we are also very bad. Sometimes we see clearly, but sometimes we just can’t see a bleedin’ thing. Sometimes we understand what’s going on, but oftentimes we are just plain dazed and confused.

I keep silence because I believe the advice of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons) that it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt! So I think it is helpful to start with a dose of reverent humility.

The second thing with which we may want to respond is a healthy dose of compassion.

What can we do to help our neighbors in Colorado and our neighbors here at home? We may not be able to do anything, as such, but we can certainly stand, sit, or kneel with them and with one another.

We can spend time with our children helping them understand that bad things often do happen to good people, and that while we cannot always prevent tragedy, we can be of service – helping to bring relief to those in sorrow or distress; we can work for justice, reconciliation, and peace; we can speak for the dead, helping to ensure that they will not have died in vain.

As human beings, our instinct is often to do something or to say something, but being present is every bit as real as saying and doing – and perhaps more so. By being present, one enters into the pain and grief of the other.

So much chatter and busy-work serves to shield us from our own emotions, our own fears, our own sense of mortality. Compassion, though, heightens our awareness of just how fragile life is, and how precious are the people with whom we live, work, and play.

There is nothing good about what happened in Colorado, but if tragedy brings us closer together, if it increases our capacity to love one another a little better, if it helps to make us a little more thoughtful, if it makes us just a bit more patient, kind, and gentle – perhaps it will have served a useful purpose above and beyond whatever goal the perpetrator may have intended upon those caught in the crosshairs of his rage.

Perhaps it will have taught us humility, compassion, and our need for mercy in this, our valley.