A Terrible, Beautiful World

A Terrible, Beautiful World--February 15, 2018

"I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as wise as snakes and as innocent as doves." --Matthew 10:16

"Oh my God, what a world you have made... What a terrible world, what a beautiful world...." --The Decemberists

I am looking--still--for the right words to answer my daughter.  Last night, at bedtime, she asked me, tracing the smudged remains of the ash cross on my forehead, "What is it like to die?"

That would have been a difficult question to answer for a four-year-old on any day, but yesterday was... fraught with particular heaviness, like some uncanny portentous aligning of the planets.  

It was a day of gravitas yesterday already before 2:30 in the afternoon.  

It began, for me, with a trip to the hospital to visit a new mother who had just given birth the night before.  This is one of the privileges of parish ministry, I confess--the opportunity to see children's lives right from birth sometimes, and to then get to walk with them through the milestones of their lives as they grow up before my eyes.  The day began with a celebration of birth and a prayer asking God's blessing on the new life and the new mother.

By noon, it was time for a funeral, which is really just a euphemism we religious professionals use for "doing our best to try and juggle utter heartache, the pain of absence, and the reality of a resurrection hope without dropping any one of those chainsaws as they hurtle through the air, and without confusing sentimentality for substance."  We said our goodbyes to a dear woman in the one congregation who had seen more than her share of heartaches and struggles in this life, who was ready and at peace to go to her rest, and whose face wore the tiredness of it all after eighty-odd years.  

And so it was that in the space of just a few hours that I was brought face to face again with just how close birth and the grave really are, just how precarious and fragile the line between life and death are at any moment.  These are things all of us intellectually "know" on any given day, but most of us push that awareness to the far back of our minds for as much of the time as possible.  We know, too, that birth and death are more ambiguous in their meanings than we usually admit, as well--we know that birth often brings fear and anxiety for new parents just as much as it brings joy to them, and we know that sometimes death is as much a release from prolonged suffering and a moment of homecoming as it is a time for tears and sorrow.  The world, it turns out, is full of life and death at all times, and life and death themselves are always ambiguously muddled with joy and with sorrow, with fear and with peace.

And, of course, it was Ash Wednesday.  Like the meme circulating social media this week (at least among a number of pastors I know) has said, for many of us yesterday we had to work on Valentine's Day, and our job was to remind others, and to be reminded ourselves, that we are all dust, and to dust we shall return.  Life is always inescapably fragile, and that was already clear to my mind before 2:30 in the afternoon with a birth and a death to pray over... and then the liturgical calendar underlined it all in big smudgy black lines, not only on my forehead, but on the foreheads of sixty-odd people, young and old, who dared entrust me with the responsibility of tracing the cross on them in ashes, of speaking out loud our common mortality, and then of daring to say that there was more to be spoken after the announcement of death.

Had that been everything, my daughter's question would have been tricky enough at bedtime.  But yesterday was also another--and how utterly awful that we must use the modifier "another"--school shooting in America, an act of senseless violence that began several hundred miles south of me just about the time I was walking from a grave at which I had just traced a cross in sprinkled earth and sand on top of a casket.  2:30 in the afternoon was a terrible time yesterday in more than one place, it appears.

My daughter, of course, has no knowledge yet of what happened in Florida yesterday.  As a rule, I do not lie to my daughter, or to my son, but there are indeed limits to how much reality they can be asked to bear at once.  So as she asked me, sitting up in her bed, getting her fingers sooty again from touching the lingering ash on my forehead, she did not know what I did. Her question about death was still preserved from the reality that we grown-ups know, increasingly all too well.  Even if we have convinced ourselves that there is a "natural" order and timing for death that makes it somehow less tragic when those who have lived a full, good life and are ready to be at rest, the world is not quite so neat and tidy.  Ours is a culture in which we not only must remember that death may come after eighty or ninety years, but in which schoolchildren are increasingly at risk of being killed, and in which we have now created a civil liturgy of our own to address it, in which we first say we are shocked and saddened, and then we get momentarily outraged on social media, blame our respective partisan boogeymen, pretend to be frustrated when nothing happens to change anything, pretend not to be relieved when we blame folks on the other side of the political aisle for not "understanding the issue" like we are all convinced we do, and then quietly go back to our business and lives, deciding in the end that the death of 17 people is simply part of the price we have to pay for living in the society that we do.  They become "unfortunate statistics," and then we have nothing more to say while we stare at our feet and blame others for not doing anything.

So as she asked me her honest question, perhaps only inquiring why she had been brought to church on a weeknight only to have her Daddy draw in black dust on her face when she would have gotten in trouble at home if she had drawn on her face in soot.  And yet I could not help but think about how many more layers of difficulty there are to her question, because there is much in the world from which I cannot protect her.

I know that last night's question and my simple, four-year-old version of an answer was not the end of a conversation.  In the darkness last night, I told her that death is like those times when she falls asleep in the car on the ride home, with her mommy or me driving, and then when she wakes up she is at home in her bed in a brand new day, and feels somehow even more at home than when she fell asleep in the car the night before.  That is perhaps enough for her at four years old.

But of course, there is more to be said--and more that needs to be clearly not said.  I cannot promise my girl that she will be forever safe in this world.  The fact that my children were not the ones taken by a lone shooter with an assault weapon and a plan to inflict as much damage as possible is not a guarantee that she will never be in such a situation.  Like I say, I make a policy of not lying to my children, and so I cannot make the empty promise that they will never face such danger in this world.  If I am to be honest, neither can I promise that it will get better, or that others around her will do everything they can to help make her world safer.  They will not.  We know that already from our national liturgy over such events now--we move from saying it is very sad, to making empty promises, and then to the next day's news.  I cannot promise my daughter that the official words spoken around her in the airwaves, about how "we will do everything possible to help keep people safe in the future" will mean anything.  Such words are woefully inadequate, and I dare not tell my daughter, "Trust the people in charge. They are working to make things better and safer," when I know full well they are not.  Just like I cannot tell my daughter that there will never be someone who hates her because of the color of her skin, or makes judgments about her worth or her story because of her hair, I cannot tell my children that they live in a time where "we are doing everything we can" to make it better.  We are not.

I also know that I cannot lie to my daughter that there is some action that we could take--her, me, us in our family, or as a whole nation--that would guarantee her safety, for that matter.  I will not lie to her and say that if we owned a gun she would be any safer in the world, and I will not lie to her in the other direction and tell her that if we could some how get rid of all guns that no one would find some other horrible weapon to kill people with.  We have been killing each other long before the invention of gunpowder, after all.  Clearly, there is something deeply wrong inside us as a species--technology has simply made us far more efficient at killing each other now that we can do it with a simple twitch of a finger or the pressing of a button.  So I have committed myself not to lying to her with some kind of oversimplification that either having more guns would make her safe or that getting rid of all the guns in the world would stop the deep-seeded hatred that still lies inside of us.  There are certainly things that might make her more or less likely to be involved in an episode of mass violence, but I cannot make her an ironclad promise.

I am stuck with the world as it really is--a world that is inescapably dangerous, and also a world in which the kinds of things we theoretically could all commit to do to change things we do not have the collective resolve actually to do.  And much like I will have to teach my daughter that she will have to live in a world where some will disparage her because of her skin or hair, even though I know it is unjust and unfair that she has to live in such a world, I will have to teach her, too, that we live in a world that is often indifferent to actually keeping her safe, a world that has just decided the costs are too high to protect her.  

For all that I cannot do for my daughter, I can teach her how to live in the way of Jesus in the midst of a world that will often be indifferent to her and even more often will be out of our control.

What I can do is to teach my children about how we will live in a world of violence without succumbing to it ourselves.  What I can teach them is to see the world with honesty--that there are both wonderful things in it, and horrible things in it.  I will teach them the lyrics of that song by The Decemberists, written after Newtown, which honestly say, "Oh my God, what a world you have made... what a terrible world, what a beautiful world..."  I can teach my children not to trust in the comfort of scapegoating "those people" as the source of all the problems, and I will teach them not to believe that they can keep themselves safe from violence by threatening others with violence first.  I can teach my children that it is a choice to be ruled by fear in this life, and that they may choose any of a million ways to be ruled by fear, but that none of them really bring the peace that fear promises by offering convenient "bad guys" to blame.  I can teach them to see, like Solzhenitsyn said, that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart, and does not adhere to borderlines between countries or fit a profile.

What I can do is to teach my children, like the teacher in Florida who offered his life up by taking bullets to protect the lives of students, to face the inescapable danger and indifference of the times in which they live with Christ-like courage--which is always the courage to take the hit in order to protect others rather than to attack.  What I can do is to teach my children to live, as I will strive to live as her father, with the courage that lays our lives down for others but will not resort to attacking others first, or being ruled by fear.

In the midst of this world as it is, we cannot pretend that there is a way to make everything safe all the time, and we cannot pretend that the public voices who insist they are doing "all they can" to protect them really mean that when they do not. Idols promise safety if we will only pay the price they demand.  The living Christ makes no such empty promises, but only offers a way to live with our heads held up in the midst of a beautiful and terrible world.  And indeed, it is indeed a beautiful and terrible world.  But what we do as the followers of Jesus is to respond to its danger in the way of Jesus--a way that is always marked by courage, by love, by the willingness to put ourselves between danger and others, and by the commitment not to return evil with evil or hatred with hatred.

I expect that will not only be a conversation for another night with my daughter, but a lifetime of living it out together with her, and with other followers of Jesus alongside us.

Lord Jesus, teach us to walk in your ways, not simply on the days when it is easy and safe, but especially in the face of danger and the appeal of idols that promise they can protect us.