Monday after

I read the New York Times story on the victims of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting this morning. There are photos of many of them—often snapshots, gathered from family or friends. Their photos are a little blurred, as cropping and enlargement focuses on what was just one face in a community of people. 

I didn’t need the photographs to picture them. I just think of their counterparts at the synagogues near my own church, on a tree-lined street near Chicago, of their counterparts at my own church—the ones who come early, the ones who greet visitors, the ones who change lightbulbs, who are known to all, the ones with the forty-year history in the congregation. The ones whose lives of good works are known and acknowledged, but are nothing all that special with this community, because they are part of lives of quiet, faithful service to God, part of a wide, inclusive understanding of God’s goodness. 

To make this comparison is not to take away the victim's identity as Jews, nor to deflect attention from the unique evil of anti-semitism. I don’t want to do that. Lutherans celebrated Reformation Sunday yesterday and even as we embrace the truth and freedom of the gospel, we dare not forget the darker, anti-semitic vitriol in Luther’s writing. We dare not forget it because of its role in centuries of hate and violence towards Jews. 

When I opened Twitter yesterday morning, there was a tweet from pastor and writer Nadia Bolz-Weber at the top: "Twitter - help me find a prayer for the martyrs of Pittsburgh?" She was getting ready for a speaking engagement later in the day. I looked at the replies to her tweet. Kaddish was at the top. Then this:

And many more prayers, some sourced, some original. Some for comfort, many for an end to gun violence and hateful rhetoric. So I prayed. That grounding in community held me for many hours yesterday.

I am, like many people, disgusted by a president of the United States and a political party backing him that play on hate and fear to hold onto power. There are many who would argue that you can't hold these leaders responsible for the deeds of a madman, and our American creed of individualism and individual responsibility would support that. 

But there are better ways to be together, better ways to live our lives together. You see it in the community of people who gather in a synagogue on a Saturday morning, in a community of prayer and mourning on Twitter, in Christian churches on Sunday mornings.

May you see it somewhere today--on a Monday morning in fall. May it be a blessing to you! 

Saints and poets

It's been a day, a full day. Not a productive day.

I spent time in the world of Franz Schubert today, the early-19th century composer who lived, in the lecturer's words, "a short life of romantic intensity." I did some singing, too--Schubert's "An die Musik"--which is about beauty and emotion and the capacity of music and language to move us into a deeper connection with our lives, ourselves, and big things that are hard to understand.

"Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?" says Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." 

Not really, replies the Stage Manage. "Saints and poets, maybe" 

Composers, too.

There was sad news coming in from many directions today. Nothing that affects me personally, but still--one needs to reflect and take it all in and figure out where this new grief fits in the world I will wake up to tomorrow. It's a world in which death is ever present, but we keep going.

Over at the Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl McPhee, who lost her mother a year ago, described grief this way:

It’s like moving through mud (which is a big improvement from trying to move through cement, which is what it was like in the beginning.)

That's exactly what's it like. Thankfully we've got music and poetry—and knitting—to help us keep moving.