It's slow-motion, protracted grief.
News reports trickle in, one at a time, a day at a time so far, about the identities of the victims of the van attack on north Yonge Street on Monday.
Such random victims.
Victims of a rage -- either against himself or against others in general, that no one foresaw suddenly exploding in that way.
As I take in the slow, one-by-one, day-by-day identification of the victims I remember a book I read years ago in school -- The Bridge of San Luis Rey written in 1927 by W. Thornton Wilder. It's the story of the collapse of an Incan rope bridge across a great chasm in Peru, and of five people who were on the bridge at the time and fell to their deaths -- who they were, their separate life stories, and how each in their own way came to be on the bridge at the moment of its collapse.
A religious brother named Brother Juniper who witnesses the tragedy is troubled by it, and he sets out to explore the lives of those who died, thinking that somehow he will find evidence of divine providence in what happened to them. He needs to believe, and to prove to others that people live and die by the good and perfect will of God. That life is not random and its events accidental. But he cannot find the answer he is looking for, and in the end he is condemned by the church as a heretic for what he has not been able to demonstrate.
I also remember a story about Mister Rogers, I think told by Mister Rogers himself. When he was a child, so it goes, he became aware of bad things happening in the world, and he asked his mother, who was a very religious person, where God's angels were when these bad things happened. Thinking, of course, that the role of angels is to protect us -- at least, those of us whom God deigns to protect. To which his mom replied, "When something bad happens, when something tragic occurs, look for the helpers. If you look for the helpers, you will see God's angels."
Angels who help. Who reach out to comfort. Who sit and weep, or stand and lament over other's pain and loss. Who know both their utter weakness and their true power. Who refuse to shoot a suspect just because he may have a gun. Who in response to tragedy are not moved to incite fear and bring further sorrow into the life of the world, but to wonder at how we might continue to live out love even more fully as the only answer we have to the pain of life.
For there is that famous conclusion to Wilder's story, still standing after all these years:
"But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."
Last night the ER at St. Joe's was particularly alive.
Above average number of folks coming in for care. A steady stream of ambulance arrivals. Longer than usual wait times, but with enough of the variety of humankind around to make it interesting. Especially two different people brought in by police escort in the course of an hour.
The first was a young man who seemed really not too dissimilar from any of the rest of us. The two officers who brought him in seemed almost incidental to the scene.
The second was a young woman whose profanity, complaints, ploys, anger, and threats made us all both thankful and a little anxious for the two female officers responsible for her. And kept us all enthralled for the better part of the evening as she made her way with us through triage, waiting room, assessment, more waiting, testing, more waiting again, and then step-by-step treatment.
I say "with us." At each step along the way she was isolated and watched-over by the officers in an enclosed room of real walls, isolated from us but for the open door. But she was very much part of our journey, as her voice and her defiant spirit flowed out of whatever room she was in, to fill the rest of the ER and grab our hungry attention.
Some expressed shock and dismay that a young woman would be shouting such crude profanity, and for so long. "Has she no pride?" "Has she no self-respect?" "What kind of woman acts like that?" Indignation. Disgust. Incomprehension.
Others could be seen turning their heads and even craning their necks to try to catch a glimpse of this she-force of nature in our midst. Some even arranged little walks and side-trips for themselves to try to see what she looked like. Like you would any sideshow. Curiosity. Delight in the unusual and outrageous.
I wondered, as I'm sure others did, what she was "in for." What crime had she committed? Why the police officers? And what injury had she sustained, or what drug had she taken, or what disorder was she suffering to make them bring her first to a hospital? Curiosity of a different kind, but no less alienated and objectifying.
The officers must have seen her as a threat to run, as they had her in cuffs when they arrived. As things went on, they seemed to see her also a threat to herself, to others, and to hospital property because at one point at least they also cuffed her to the bed to limit her mobility. Word spread some time later that she was even "tied down."
Many, though, did their best just to ignore her. Maybe to avoid getting involved, and stay safe. Maybe to give her some space and a chance to regain some dignity. Maybe because their own ailments and reason for being in ER were quite enough for them to cope with. All kinds of reasons to practice distance and separation.
What most caught my attention was an overheard conversation among a cluster of paramedics waiting with their stretchered patients not far from where the young woman, unseen but still clearly heard, was maintaining her defiant challenge against authority a full three or four hours after first entering the institution.
Word was circulating that the medical staff were going to give her a mild sedative.
"I can understand calming her down," one paramedic said. "But you sure don't want to break her spirit."
"Yeah," said another, "with a spirit like that, she'd make a great fire-fighter."
So many ways of seeing the same thing, the same person ... so many different starting points and so many different end results when it comes to relating to others around us ...
Last night I attended a Presbytery meeting ... and fun broke out!
It was the oddest thing.
I think it started when three women shared with us a report on a year-long experiment in amalgamation by three struggling congregations that they were involved in, that in the end "didn't work" -- and that we honestly applauded. Not because we were glad the amalgamation didn't take, or that one of the three congregations is now closed and the other two face even more challenges back in their own separate places. But somehow the courage, openness, and honesty of both the experiment and the report moved us to some new place as a presbytery that seemed quite joyous and freeing.
Then there was the report on the Skylight Festival this summer and the need for financial support if it's to include all that the planners envision ... that led to a motion (passed unanimously) to direct Mission Council to consider sponsoring an invited presenter, to the tune of $2,500 ... and then to the Social Justice Committee deciding at a hastily called meeting at the coffee break to commit $500 of their budget to the Festival .. and then an impromptu free-will offering among the presbyters that raised another $507! And ... oddest thing of all, we seemed to be having fun being so spontaneously generous!
And then there was the Resource Centre conversation question: "Think about the end of Presbytery [remember: Presbytery and Conference are slated to cease to exist as entities after Dec 31, 2018 as the United Church restructures itself, and none of us have any real clue as to how the important things we count on from the these levels of the church are going to be done after that date -- quite a fearsome prospect in some ways] ... what sort of Resource Centre would you need?" And the unusually engaging and hopeful comments and suggestions that ensued. We were actually having fun envisioning a little bit of a new future beyond the death of what we know.
I wonder if there's something about dying ... or at least, about detachment from the need (or even the possibility) to maintain what we are and what we are in, against dying, that frees our spirit -- or Spirit in us, to enjoy the present moment in a different way than usual ... to just simply have fun with the possibilities for courage, generosity and creativity that are always with us, but are most often hidden by the prayer and the need we feel for things to stay as we have known them.
