At least that's how it feels,
recently,
or is it because I age?
Has it always been this way?
I don't know.
Life seems cheap.
A 15 year old Mormon boy carries fire arms into a school
and blows a 14 year old away just
as the freshman walks into his high school locker room.
There's fighting in Ukraine,
Afghanistan,
Iraq,
Egypt
Iran,
Syria,
Pure Atrocities.
The senseless taking of human life.
Where is the value of a human?
A person
created in God's image?
Has it been lost?
Has it disappeared?
Have humans always been of little value
to each other?
I listened to a science Friday on NPR today.
All about robots
and our future,
AI
Artificial Intelligence.
Robots with sentience?
What's Scared?
In our world today
what can't be touched because it's holy?
Churches and Mosques can easily be bombed.
Rwandans hid in churches during the genocide
and were brutally slaughtered there.
I believe human beings,
each and everyone
are holy,
sacred.
How do I show this?
What are my actions and thoughts portraying this belief?
Lord,
Help me to see YOU in every person I come in contact with.
Help me to see the Sacred,
Help me to honor the Sacred,
Help me to love the Sacred.
God created us
therefore we are Sacred,
we are Holy.
I didn't blog yesterday, June 8, 2014,
breaking my challenge to myself.
But it's ok.
This will be a two for one blog post!
Angel's Rest:
I spent Sunday morning fast hiking
up Angel's Rest
with Miko, our husky.
We soaked in the view from the top.
The trail was full of weekenders
some asking me where the trail led,
where the summit was,
how much longer to the top?
It thrills me to see people out there,
especially children.
Miko and I jogged down.
I feel fit and ready for Uganda and Mt. Kilimanjaro,
physically.
My biggest challenge will be mental.
Usual for me.
I celebrated a friend's 50th after my Angel's Rest jaunt.
"Welcome to my decade, Linda!"
Took my son to an incoming freshman church BBQ and then...
The Fault In Our Stars:
Though I was tired
I went to see The Fault In Our Stars
with my Baby Girl.
We got home at midnight.
I haven't read the book.
I liked the movie,
though I found fault.
(Pun intended)
It lacked depth.
Maybe I need to read the book.
I liked glimpsing inside the minds of teens who are dying,
teens who know their lives will be short.
I liked many of the quotes.
I liked Hazel Grace's no nonsense reality
and Augustus Water's
sense of hope and desire to live life LARGE
trying to be remembered.
They each had something the other needed.
This was sweet.
The parent's anxious protectiveness
and attempt to stay positive was spot on.
Hazel Grace's need to know her mom and dad
were going to be ok when she was gone was truthful.
Nonetheless, the parent's characters felt flat to me.
It skimmed the surface of the complicated emotions
of each character
as they dealt with the reality of their impending death
or loss of something,
like a leg,
sight,
ability to breathe.
I did see the shallow,
trite commenting,
guitar playing,
"literally in the Heart of Jesus" Christian
teen support group leader as genuine.
Sad, but True.
But it's what I would expect
from a "teenie bopper" movie.
Maybe I need to read the book.
I understood what they were trying to explore,
but it could have been so much more.
Maybe that intensity of complicated emotions
can only be reached in reality.
(Spoiler Alert)
I knew Augustus would die before Hazel Grace
the minute he named his cancer,
osteosarcoma.
Sarcomas are relentless.
I loved hating the author,
Van Houten
who lost hope in life,
was an alcoholic asshole,
relegating Hazel and Gus's lives
to nothing more than evolutionary mutations.
I've met people like this.
I pity them.
I loved hearing the Anne Frank quotes
as Hazel Grace pushed her limits climbing
the stairs and ladders of the Anne Frank House.
I found the quotes to be fitting to what
Augustus and Hazel were dealing with as dying teens.
However;
I balked at their first kiss and the people around them clapping
as they stood in what I feel is sacred space.
Only solemnity,
reverence,
heavy heartbreaking awe
should fill that place.
But what Hollywood can never get right
is the reality of death's face.
Augustus did not look like he was dying,
even with makeup.
Neither did Hazel Grace.
Death,
real death is not pretty.
I know what dying from cancer looks like.
They were too beautiful.
My mind never accepted they were dying.
For me, My Sister's Keeper
was a more powerful attempt to tell the story of childhood cancer,
though it too missed the mark.
In both movies,
the actors who supposedly have cancer
didn't look like the many children and teens
I've seen walking the halls of pediatric cancer clinics.
Yes, Hollywood shaves their heads,
but they never shave their eyelashes and eyebrows.
They are not believable to me.
And I found it easy and distracting as I
searched for the extras
who actually had cancer.
For me
the movie didn't touch the depth of pain cancer causes
its victims and those who love them
nor the profound grief that arises long after the person has either
died or survived.
Hollywood just can't help romanticizing death and even cancer.
I was the oldest person sitting in that theater,
sobs of the young women around me was
sadly
kind of funny,
and yet
I worried for these young romantic hearted girls.
As I drove away last night,
I wondered...
When death and/or cancer comes into their lives
for real
will they be shocked and angry it's not like the movies?
We know the name of the dead and wounded now. The face and name of the shooter is cycling through all the media. The hero is being applauded over and over as he has sequestered himself at home with friends & family refusing to speak publicly. He doesn't want to distract attention from the senseless death of Paul Lee. More of the story is being revealed piece by piece.
But this writing I've posted below says it all. Dr. Jack Levison is an SPU professor who sat and prayed and cried with my Jubilee and her fellow students as they gathered outside the packed church. His words speak to all tragedies...
After the Shooting At SPU: Desolation, Consolation... Hope
Posted: Updated:
I expected the shock of an earthquake--not a shooting. In fact, they're retrofitting our oldest building, Alexander Hall, to prevent earthquake damage. How do we retrofit Otto Miller Hall lobby, where yesterday's shooting took place? Erase the memories? Sure, we can remove the blood-stained carpet, paint the blood-splattered walls, clean up the shell casings.
But the lobby, which I've walked through hundreds of times on my way to class, where I've casually picked up a free copy of the New York Times, where students gather to study and chat, will always be the place where "the shooting" happened. We'll always be that small Christian college in Seattle that had the shooting. The name will reverberate. Columbine. Virginia Tech. SPU.
Yet this community is so much more than a now infamous acronym.
Last night I sat with a group of students. The scheduled prayer service was packed, overflowing, so my wife Priscilla and I, both SPU faculty, were directed to a makeshift mass of students sitting in small groups in the evening light on The Loop, the central grassy area on campus, which sits less than a football field from Otto Miller Hall. Priscilla started us off in prayer with the words, "Gracious God." Then we mostly sat silent, bewildered.
None of them, not one, asked God to make things right. They sat in grief.
None of them, not one, found easy solutions. They sat in unknowing.
None of them, not one, filled the air with clichés or cheap prayers. They sat in silence.
We listened to other groups singing quietly their own songs. A few young women found the old hymn "Be Still My Soul" on their phone:
Be still, my soul: the Lord is on thy side. Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain. Leave to thy God to order and provide; In every change, He faithful will remain. Be still, my soul: thy best, thy heavenly Friend Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.
We must have sung six or seven verses, all slowly, all quietly, all prayerfully. But mostly we held hands, picked at the grass, wondered, grieved with each other, simply took time to breathe.
A few of us read a smattering of scripture.
The young man next to me read from Psalm 18: "Out of my distress I called on the Lord."
I read from Lamentations: "for God does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone."
A young woman read slowly, thoughtfully, from Ecclesiastes: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven ... a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance ... a time to keep silence, and a time to speak ..." For everything there is a season.
I am dumbstruck, dope-slapped by the ambiguity of it all. The mixed-up jumble of existence we call life. Priscilla's spiritual director from our Chicago days, Jane Koonce, told her, "In consolation, remember desolation. In desolation, remember consolation." We do. We have. Both.
For everything there is a season. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. I understand the rhythm of this, the wisdom of it. Yet sometimes we have both, even when we're not sure which is which. Sometimes we weep and laugh at the same time. We mourn as we dance, dance as we mourn. Sometimes there is consolation during desolation, desolation during consolation.
Consolation in desolation, desolation in consolation. Being given the chance, at fifty-seven, to sit with twenty-two year old students on a golden evening in a grassy collegiate quad--praying with them for people we don't even know, holding the hands of students whose exams I've graded or others I've just met, and caring, really caring, how they're doing.
Is it callous to say I found consolation in desolation on that grassy quad with students I admire and cherish? These students were so reflective, comfortable in the silence, mature in their prayers for the shooter, the victims, our community. I didn't mean to or want to, but I felt hopeful. In four short years, just 120 weeks, these students, most of them seniors, had learned to live into ambiguity, had garnered a textured faith free of trivialities.
I tell my students I teach for when they're forty, when they're black and blue. I'm honest with them about ambiguity and doubt and worries that pierce the hollow night. I'm honest with them, too, about faith. I'm still believing, still hoping, still laughing as I weep, weeping as I laugh, dancing as I mourn, mourning as I dance.
Well, yesterday our campus turned forty. All of us. In the split seconds of text alerts and booming shots. In the sirens. In the cameras and news trucks. In the grassy quad. In the evening light. In prayer.
A canal runs near the SPU campus, just on the other side of Otto Miller Hall. I've walked with countless students along that canal, talking about boyfriends and grammar and grad school and summer plans. Not far down the canal, you can watch the salmon return home to spawn. They're scarred, every last one of them, with scales missing, totems of hooks and bites engraved on their bodies. And they're still swimming. These are the salmon that survive, the ones that make it, the hope of the future.
I'm not quite ready to talk hope. I believe in the resurrection of Jesus, yes. I believe in the life everlasting, as the creed puts it. But for now I grieve, as sad at dawn this morning as I was at dusk last night. Sad for the mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, and friends grieving a lost son, urging a daughter back to life. But I confess, too, to a certain deep consolation--maybe it is hope after all--lying somewhere inside me next to that ball of grief, as I recollect the faces and faith of my students.
think about (something) carefully, especially before making a decision or reaching a conclusion.
"I pondered the question of what clothes to wear for the occasion"
synonyms:
think about, contemplate, consider, review, reflect on, mull over, meditate on, muse on, deliberate about, cogitate on, dwell on, brood on, ruminate on, chew over, puzzle over, turn over in one's mind, overthink
"she had time to ponder over the incident"
That's me.
I ponder,
not so much about the mundane,
everyday,
silly stuff.
Mostly I ponder life
God
Relationships
Jesus
the whys
the what did I do wrong?
what could I have said?
kind of questions.
I also ponder the heavy stuff.
suffering
pain
the purpose of it all
the how did I get here?
meaning how did my life get to the place it is NOW?
kind of questions.
I pondered as a child.
I ponder now
and I'm sure I will ponder in the future.
Sometimes I've felt
pondering makes life more complicated.
Some pondering questions have no answers.
I know people who don't seem to ponder.
Some are very close to me.
They see everything very simply.
I see everything as complicated.
They see more black and white.
I see shades of grey.
In a conversation I had today,
someone said
Jesus lived in the grey areas of life.
I resonated with that thought.
I'm pondering it now.
Kayce Stevens Hughlett says"Pondering is about giving weight (or attention) to something for a period of time and then letting it go. It’s about freedom not confinement. That doesn't mean pondering is always easy."
