On
Sunday morning at 2:02 a.m. I was restlessly reading in bed. I knew why I was
having trouble sleeping. Lisa was away, which I always find disorienting. And
J.J. and I had stayed up late to watch television and eat bowlfuls of ice cream
with fresh strawberries—not exactly a prescription for sound and settled rest. I
read my book and listened through the window to the sounds of the frogs and
birds calling to each other on our little lake. As I did so, one of the worst massacres
in American history was occurring at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.
*
The
days that followed have brought many words but little understanding. Events
like this confuse and confound us, and our language multiplies correspondingly.
In the face of the irrational, we are inundated with reasons; in the face of
the inexplicable, we are inundated with explanations; in the face of loss and
despair, we are inundated with the voices of the aspiring and opportunistic. The
cacophonous clamor of our words overwhelms real communication and true
communion. A cynic might say: on the eighth day man invented language, and no
one—no one save God—has heard anything since.
We
cannot even agree on the subject matter of the conversation. Should we be
talking about gun control, or law enforcement, or terrorism, or mental health
resources, or radicalized religious movements, or our long and ugly history of
violence against the LGBT community, or our long and ugly history of
violence—period? Should we be focused on
the shooter, trying to understand his motives and methods in our efforts to
keep this from happening again? Or should we direct our attention toward the
victims, trying to ensure that the magnitude of this tragedy does not reduce
them to statistics? Should we talk about the numbers? Or should we talk about
the victims as individuals, learn their stories, and say their names?
As a community of faith, we do what we are
doing tonight and have done for two thousand years. We gather; we mourn; we
reflect; we comfort each other; we pray. But this response, too, has become a
subject of debate. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, a number of
political leaders and celebrities publicly expressed their prayers for the
victims and their families and friends. This elicited a bitter response from
some people: “stop talking about your prayers and do something,” they said. And
how do we answer that challenge? How do we think about what we are doing
tonight, right here, right now? Do we view our prayers as an end—an exercise in
healing, a confession of our own violent natures, and a plea for guidance from
the only One who finally has any to offer? Or do we view our prayers as a
beginning—an exercise in recommitment, a promise to work tirelessly in
opposition to violence and hatred, and a declaration that we will strive
courageously to bring God’s kingdom of peace into this world and to all of our
brothers and sisters—every last one, everyone in, nobody out?
And—if
we cannot figure out how to talk and think about these things—then how can we
help our children and grandchildren do so? Years ago, the brilliant essayist
and physician Lewis Thomas wrote an article called “Late Night Thoughts on
Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.” The thrust of the essay was that Thomas
had lost his ability to listen with the same pleasure to a piece of music that
had previously brought him hope and consolation. The threat of nuclear
annihilation—estimates of eighty million dead—had made the music feel
irrelevant, disconnected from the current state of things. He wrote:
If I were sixteen or
seventeen years old and had to listen to [those descriptions of nuclear war,]
or read things like that, I would begin thinking up new kinds of sounds,
different from any music heard before, and I would be twisting and turning to
rid myself of human language.
The challenges posed to
our youth now seem even greater. Talk of nuclear annihilation can feel
comfortingly abstract—I remember drills in elementary school where we would be
ordered to squat under our desks in preparation for a hydrogen bomb, an
exercise that struck us as hilariously detached from anything like reality. But
today our children hear stories of people murdered in cold blood as they sit in
a classroom, or at a movie theater, or in a Bible study meeting at church. The
victims at the club in Orlando did not initially realize what was going on
because they were so caught up in the joy, the dancing, and the music.
So
we struggle with the limitations of our words and our language. But struggle we
must, because the end of all goodness in the world lies in a quiet acquiescence
to violence. If the crucifixion of Jesus Christ teaches us nothing else, surely
it teaches us that much. As I have previously observed in this very sanctuary:
I do not know many things; but I know that evil has a muscular co-conspirator
in silence.
So
we go to language—including the language of music—because we must. We can do
nothing until we can navigate the language of grief, the language of despair,
the language of outrage, the language of justice, the language of inclusion,
the language of compassion. “In the beginning,” we are told, “was the word. And
the word was with God. And the word was God.”
*
The
book I was reading on Sunday morning at 2:02 a.m. is called Letters to Yesenin, by the late author Jim
Harrison. In the nineteen-seventies, Harrison found himself in a profoundly
depressed state: living in poverty, working on a hardscrabble farm, filled with
despair, and contemplating suicide. In an oddly therapeutic exercise, he wrote
a series of short letters ostensibly addressed to a Russian poet named Sergei
Yesenin, who had hanged himself in 1925. The book is a compilation of those
letters.
The
book is hard reading: brutally candid; explicit; tortured; and confused. You
can perhaps understand why it was not helping much in my effort to get to
sleep. But, at the same time, the book is a kind of redemption song. Harrison
finds his way out through a combination of language, image, and memory. I
suspect that if we are to find our way out, then our path must look much the
same.
Let
me describe to you two passages in the book that I think may be particularly
helpful tonight. In one, Harrison describes a “cold autumn evening” when the
impulse toward self-destruction became particularly strong. But then he saw
something that brought the compulsion to a full and immediate halt. He writes:
“My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”
In
a second passage, he acknowledges the abundant challenges of the world but also
finds a reason to live through a small and isolated act of kindness and
caregiving. “To be frank,” he writes at the end of the book, “I’d rather live
to feed my dogs, knowing the world says no
in ten thousand ways and yes in
only a few.” You do not need to agree with Harrison’s math to agree with the
point: if we have any chance at all, it is in the yes of love; it is the only hope we have now; it is the only hope
we have ever had.
When
two or more are gathered in His name then He is there. So we gather tonight in
the name and in the presence of the most powerful force in the universe, the
One who knows your name, the One who knows the names of each and every victim
in Orlando, the one who became a victim of human violence that we might know
that He suffers with us, beside us, for us.
We
gather to cry: “yes.”
We
gather to shout: “stop.”
And
the people said: Amen.
