Thoughts after a tragedy

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."