"Grieving Our Lost Children," Walter Brueggemann

Walter Brueggemann, totally rad theologian, wrote a book called Prayers for a Privileged People. I was thumbing through it for something entirely unrelated, when this caught my attention. It was written following the 2006 shooting at Virginia Tech, I think, and in light of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it bears repeating. It's full of words I was looking for these last few weeks. Glad to have found them, now.

Another brutality,
another school killing,
another grief beyond telling...
   and loss...
     in Colorado,
     in Wisconsin,
     among the Amish,
     in Virginia.
     Where next?

We are reduced to weeping silence,
   even as we breed a violent culture,
   even as we kill the sons and daughters of our "enemies,"
   even as we fail to live and cherish and respect the forgotten of our common life.

There is no joy among us as we empty our schoolhouses;
there is no health among us as we move in fear and bottomless anxiety;
there is little hope among us as we fall helpless before the gunshot and the shriek and the blood and the panic;
we pray to you only because we do not know what else to do.
 
So we pray, move powerfully in our body politic,
      move us toward peaceableness
          that does not want to hurt or kill,
      move us toward justice
          that the troubled and the forgotten may know mercy,
      move us toward forgiveness that we
          may escape the trap of revenge.

Empower us to turn our weapons to acts of mercy,
     to turn our missiles to gestures of friendship,
     to turn our bombs to policies of reconciliation;
and while we are turning,
    hear our sadness,
    our loss,
    our bitterness.

We dare to pray our needfulness to you
    because you have been there on that
    gray Friday,
    and watched your own Son be murdered
          for "reasons of state."

Good God, do Easter!
    Here and among these families,
    here and in all our places of brutality.

Move our Easter grief now...
   without too much innocence--
   to your Sunday joy.
We pray in the one crucified and risen
   who is our Savior and Lord.

Carry me through, Lord. Carry me through.

Lately, a few of us have been wondering to ourselves and out loud just what exactly it is that we're doing here. What is it to be a pastor? Why is it that we're on this grand four-year adventure to become pastors? We all have different answers to these questions and most of them are just more questions, frankly.

One of our internship goals is supposed to be to develop our pastoral identity. I was trying to explain to my mom what that even means, and struggled. Clearly I'm not checking off many boxes in this category at the moment.

And though many of us are interns right now, what that looks like is so varied. We fall in different places along many spectra -- between overwork and boredom, between excitement and fear, between assurance and doubt. 

We communicate with one another constantly, trying to figure out if what we're experiencing is "normal" or if it's unreasonable, or if it's just us that's the problem. This one of  the only ways we're surviving, I think--each other.

And that's when it hits me.

Someone has to be around to carry our deepest, most complicated stuff with us. Pastors do so many things, (that's something we're all learning on this internship adventure) and a lot of them are unremarkable -- leading meetings, copyediting bulletins, updating the Facebook page, etc. But a pastor can sit beside you and listen to that which you can never tell another living thing, and carry it in their heart in a way you cannot carry it on your own. 

And certainly ordination doesn't make that possible. We are reminded that ordination does not give us "magic fingers" for the eucharist, and so it most likely does not give us magic listening ears or carrying hearts. But we who are here on this journey to discover what it is to be "pastor" are developing such things. Many of us who are on this journey are already those who carry the sufferings of others on our own hearts in a way that feels abnormal. 

In the wake of the ineffably tragic massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School last week, many Americans -- not just pastors -- are finding themselves deeply, gut-wrenchingly, abnormally troubled. 

Are you? Do you well up with tears every time you see or hear anything related to the deaths of these children? I have found myself grieving in a way that I didn't even know I was capable of. I had to pull over my car when NPR reported on Monday the first funerals -- two little boys, one of whom has a twin sister who survived the tragedy. Tears are forming in my eyes now, just to type this. 

Why is this? What is it that has connected us to these people -- people we would not otherwise have ever known -- so deeply that we are weeping with them across the nation? 

And all weekend I thought about the pastors in and around Newtown who are caring for their congregations, their own families, their own selves -- where do they find those words, that strength? I wrote a letter to the Monsignor in Newtown -- ten of the children killed were from his parish -- and to the ELCA pastors closest to Newtown. It was the only thing I could think of that I could do, from here, to let those incredible humans know that the work they are doing is invaluable, and that we are all carrying them as best we can. 

There aren't words for these feelings -- all evidence to the contrary, in that I've just written a bunch of words. But these words are just words about how there aren't words. And where words fail, somehow there is something else that finds a way to communicate. There is holy, human spirit at work here. Making space for that spirit is, I suppose, why we do what we do.

There's a mountain here before me

And I'm gonna climb it with strength not my own

[God's] gonna meet me where the mountain beats me

And carry me through

Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison.

I woke up this morning and lamented that I couldn't go to Zumba class because of my still-injured toe. As my mom put it, it's too "jumpy aroundy" of an activity. Hiliarious. I called my mom to wish her happy birthday, and then hung out in my bed checking all my social networks for a preeetty long time. Around 10:30am MT, people started to tweet that a shooting had been reported at a school in Connecticut. I shook my head and sighed.

Suddenly, the tweets were not just the routine "breaking news: shots fired in Newtown, CT" but rather "hundreds of children evacuated from CT elementary school" or "entire classroom still unaccounted for" or "three rushed to hospital" and as I looked back and forth between MSNBC and Twitter, the reports careened off the edge into "one dead" then "three dead" then "six dead" then "a child is dead" then "20 shot" until finally "27 dead, 18 of which are children."

I was numb.

As each new wave of information came through, tears fell anew. It just kept getting worse.

I had some errands to run, so I pulled myself out of bed to shower and get out of the house for a little while. I'm sure I was imagining it, but everyone I saw in their car or in a store seemed sad. I definitely did not imagine watching a woman wipe her eyes while we were at a red light. She could have been crying about literally anything else in the universe. But it just seemed like there was nobody unaffected.

When I got home, I was just in time to see my President weep on national television, too. That's where we're at right now, you guys. President Obama could not even speak for four minutes about this without tears, and without stumbling over his words. This is real life.

He quoted Psalm 147 in his remarks -- God heals the brokenhearted, and binds up their wounds. It would seem, that, today, God's the only one who can.

And so, for now, my prayers are with the families of those 18 kindergarteners who should not have lost their lives today in the relative safely of their own classroom. My prayers are with the families of the staff and faculty who were killed in attempts to stop the shooter, or who found themselves in the line of fire for any other reason. My prayers are with the family and friends of the shooter, a sad young man who I wish I could hug as much as I wish I could hug all those children. My prayers are with the community of Sandy Hook and the city of Newtown, and the state of Connecticut as they hold tightly to each other and try to piece together this unspeakable violation of their way of life.

My prayers are with everyone in every city that has been affected by gun violence, especially my current residence of Littleton, CO. Since the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, there have been 31 mass shootings in the United States. And every day, people die gun-related deaths in cities all over this country.

This is where I must address that the prayers of this nation will not be enough. Nothing can ever right these wrongs, or bring anyone back to life. But what we can do is prevent, to the best of our ability, future sprees of mass murder in our communities. And this is not about one thing. There was not one cause of this or any of the mass shootings we've endured these last 13 years.

What we're able to do is limit access to weapons, expand access to mental healthcare, and remind each other at every available opportunity that our lives and the lives of all others are so, so valuable.

I hope you've been tweeting and facebooking and talking to your family and enacting any other means of catharsis you can -- I mean that in earnest. It's exactly what I've been doing. But don't stop there. Write your representatives -- including your President -- and let them know how you feel about gun violence in this country, and about mental healthcare in this country, and how your love of your neighbor leads you to those feelings.

An actively participatory citizenry is the only way that tragic gun violence we experience in this nation ever stops. Demand that your government make a change. What we're doing right now clearly is not working.

We do not have the power to stop legal gun owners from going on murderous rampages. We don't. But we do have the power to limit what guns Americans can legally own, and who can legally own those guns. Obviously, I'm for banning every gun there is outright, and there's not one of you who doesn't know that. But wherever you sit on the gun regulation spectrum, there's no way you believe that what happened today is just the price we pay for our "freedoms."

I say all of these things because I love you with all of my heart.