responding to trauma
Another senseless killing of children, and the collective grief deepens. I spoke with a friend whose daughter is beginning fourth grade. “Thank goodness, she doesn’t hear the news.” “How are you?” I asked. He gave me a clear-eyed, knowing look and said “hanging in there.”
It’s impossible for me to fathom the grief of the parents who have lost their children to such senseless violence. I try to be as fully present to them as possible, and hold their sorrow with tenderness. While I’m aware of the ongoing need to limit access to guns, there is something else that continues to gnaw at me. Among my concerns with all this violence, and the threats of more, is the psychological trauma is seeping deeper and wider into our culture. This trauma - which is what we can call spiritual - requires a kind of attention that is different from the urgent legislative tasks around gun violence prevention. We as a nation have a greater and more pervasive (spiritual) problem that threatens our very human existence. This is the challenge: staying human.
Richard Rohr’s latest book, The Tears of Things, takes it’s title from a line in the Aeneid, where the hero Aeneas is so moved with sorrow at the tragedy of the Trojan War, that he speaks of the “tears of things” (lacrimae rerum). Seamus Heaney translates it, “There are tears at the heart of things”— at the heart of our human experience. Rohr comments, “Only tears can move us beyond our paralyzing anger at evil, death, and injustice without losing the depth of the anger. This book will be one of the texts for a Northwest pastors’ retreat I’m leading in Washington later this month. It’s a commentary on the prophets, and Rohr is at his best in describing how the prophets hold a vision of God’s love for all creation, while remaining courageous to face the reality of broken humanity and the sorrow that contains. How is this possible? Rohr writes:
“Saint Francis was depicted as crying all the time in his early biographies, and I always wonder why. I now believe, after fifty-four years of public ministry, that the gift of tears and the gift of healing are almost one and the same. “Blessed are those who weep,” says Jesus, “for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4) And continues,
“Jeremiah’s sadness and tears of lamentation appear to be a divine evolution of anger.” He could no longer sustain his rage at the people’s collective folly and purposeful injustice felt everywhere. Finally, he burst into lamentation: “this why I weep; my eyes dissolve in tears, since my comforter who could revive me is far away. (Lamentations 1:15-16) Rohr concludes: “Felt reality is invariably wept reality and wept reality is soon compassion and kindness. Harsh judgments slip away in the tracks of tears. My belief is that tears, although they look like a mere emotive reaction, are much more: a deeply free action that many do not enjoy. They proceed from deep inside, where are most truly ourselves. Tears reveal the depths at which and from which we care.”
Saint Paul reminds that to be human for one another is to “weep with those who weep” and “rejoice with those who rejoice.”
I heard a lyric: “sad birds still fly.” With that consider this American Bald Eagle.