Sadness is a natural response to sorrow. Grief is a refusal to accept what is.
In the midst of joy, I am grief-stricken.
As the church choir lilted songs of a silent and holy night during Christmas morning mass, I tried to pray for the families of Newtown.
But I couldn’t.
You should pray for what you want, ask for your heart’s deepest desire, but I couln’t help but think, the only right thing is a reversal of time, a reversal of fate. I don’t want to pray that families heal. I want to pray that they not be shattered.
I refuse to accept what is.
Stark reality is unavoidable. Many little coffins and several large ones were lowered into the ground. Those earthly lives are over and I suppose that fact must be accepted.
But nothing else should be.
We are society.
There is not some mystical them whom broadcasters drone on and on about.
We the people.
We are the people who define our society, our culture and our country. We should all be grief-stricken, because in no way should we accept that we have become a people who tolerate a world where political agendas and power grabs are placed at a higher premium than the lives of little school children, their teachers, movie-goers, a child with a candy bar, Christmas shoppers and peaceful worshippers. In fact, nothing should be placed at a value higher than any life.
But it’s the lost babies who catch us in our throats, spring wells in our eyes and linger so poignantly in our minds.
They were so innocent.
What does that mean about the rest of us? Are we guilty? Complicit? How can we abhor these crimes so virulently and yet continue to sustain the very culture that fostered them? Have we given up the idea of living peacefully? Do we even believe that peace is a realistic, viable option?
These questions are hard, and if we are honest, they aim straight at our hearts.
Fortunately, the answers are easy.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone of us doesn’t know what we need to do. That’s a typical cop-out. We have consciences and consciousness. We should look to the great teachers: Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the Buddah, the Dalai Lama. Or we can just break it down to the simple truth of Spike Lee’s first big film:
Do the right thing.
If we all did the right thing, rather than waste our energy jockeying for position, great things would be accomplished.
Rapidly.
As solutions are brought to the table, the devise tenor that is so familiar resonates once again. We can’t have that. With the exception of Spike Lee, the teachers I mentioned all advocate an attitude of peace, of coming together, of prioritising love. That’s important. Healing and change take place on an energetic level first and foremost.
We are closing a sad year and beginning a new one.
Let’s leave behind our individual resolutions and focus on a collective one: to create a world without grief.
Because we can handle sadness, but we cannot accept what is right now.
Thank you, Karl. It’s a challenge to remain peaceful when the “other side” seems so loud and so wrong, but I do believe peaceful, loving energy is the way. It’s the long way, the difficult path, but the one which ultimately leads us closer to God. Happy New Year!
Rebecca, this is such a great post. I wanted to post about this and have a draft but I was too angry at the time and that doesn’t make for good argument. As you say we have the answer. It is simply where we place our values, and we as a society have ordered ourselves such that profit ranks higher than life. I saw a bumper sticker on the car of a church member that said, God, Guns, Guts, that’s what built America let’s keep them. I wrote a meditation fora publication that has published some of my submissions and received a wonderful rejection letter in which the editor assured me that this was not because the piece was not very good. But a spiritual institution was afraid to confront the issue of God and guns.
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Have a wonderful and happy new year