Wednesday, June 15, 2016

Redemption Song: Reflections After Orlando


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.

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