A Month

Last week, a month has passed since the Senseless Tragedy. I come back here to this site, and I don't know what I hope will be here. Hope? Healing? Or at the very least, shared loss? On the one hand, this is a memorial site, and so it feels like every post ought to be a beautiful monument to our friend-- as beautiful, both inside and out, as she was. And partly that's true: we should focus on the beauty of Heather's life. Phillipians 4:8 says, "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things... And the God of peace will be with you." Heather very much deserves for her legacy to be the love and joy that she unselfishly and unceasingly poured out into her family and friends.

On the other hand, where, then, do we all go with the things like the grief, the loss, the fear, the anger? Those things are real, and they are here, and sometimes they are not so beautiful. Though I have, for some years now, been only at the outer fringes of Heather's life, I know what it is to live with a new and life-altering grief. A month does nearly nothing to touch it, or to rob it of any of its freshness... rawness... overwhelmingness. Some griefs are mightier far than we, and it is the work of a few seconds from the shock of bad news to the realization that no power within us, that we have had or ever will have, can withstand it. The power to save us must come from outside our own very meager reserves. The first few steps of AA are: "We recognized that we were powerless over it; we came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity; we made the decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of god as we understood him."

One finger of that power-- the power from outside ourselves that has the strength to sustain us through an unsustainable grief-- is in our love for each other. So as we each settle in seperately for the long haul of our own private daily journeys through grieving... as the flowers die and the candles go out and the bright memorials wane behind us... let us love one another, and know that though apart, we are not ever alone. We are all together becoming, in the words of Khalil Gibran from The Prophet, "fragments of Life's great heart":

When love beckons to you, follow him,
though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you, yield to him,
though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you, believe in him,
though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you, so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth, so he is for your pruning.

Like sheaves of corn, he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,
that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you,
that you may know the secrets of your own heart,
and in that knowledge, become a frament of Life's great heart.
But if in your fear, you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
then is is better for you that you cover your nakedness
and pass out of love's threshing floor,
into the seasonless world where you shall laugh,
but not all of your laughter, and weep,
but not all of your tears.