Sometimes the best thing to do is wander until something makes sense...
or something blesses...
or something causes you to say...
oh, I remember now.
Sometimes comfort is found at the far edges
of all that has been framed up.
Keep going.
You'll be there soon.

There is a 19 year old boy all shot up in a hospital bed in Boston.  He most likely would have died by now, but there are a swarm of people trying to keep him alive.  There were throngs of people also trying to keep alive the many people this young man injured… the innocents who had no intentions of harming anyone that day. And we grieve, and we grow angry, and we want justice to be served.  We want an eye for an eye, a leg for a leg, a life for a life.  We hope to God this young man lives so we can punish him and punish him again and again for the crime he has committed.  He must pay for this.  We can heal only if he pays.
 
Down the road from me, is an odd little man. He lives alone, though he has a dog that he seems to love. 
He isn’t a pretty sight nor is his yard.  His neighbors wish he would cut down those damned dandelions and they wonder why he can’t clean the trash off of his front porch.  And no one knows him and no one seems interested in knowing him.
 
And there is a kid in every school who doesn’t fit in and there is a kid in every school who has it tremendously together and both of them are weary from the loads they bear.
 
And there are housewives and doctors and ministers and sales clerks and college students and street people and kindergarteners and elders and teachers and gardeners and mechanics and stock market brokers who seem so
normal… but who ache from the lack of human contact and connection.
 
We want it all, don’t we?  We want to do it all and have it all and be the best at everything.  We believe that lazy people and poor people and odd people pretty much get what they deserve and the rest of us who work so hard and go to church and fit ourselves into the mold that is expected of us should be respected and revered.
 
We don’t want the oddballs, the ‘mental cases’ to interfere or interrupt our lives, and we want to punish them when they do.
 
But what might happen if we started with the young and we looked at them more?  What might happen if we spent as much time looking into the eyes of a little one as we do facing a screen?  What could happen if we
threw out the hours we spend on testing our children and instead read them more stories or painted more pictures together?  What if we spent less time and money on sports and instead helped to build houses?  What might give way if we fought as fiercely for mental health services as we fight for our second amendment rights?  What if we sold our televisions and took our t.v. time to visit the man down the street who doesn’t have the money or the energy or the car to haul the trash on his porch away?
 
Our halcyon days are over because we’ve chosen other paths.  We are sure to see more violence, to be
perpetrators of violence and victims of violence because we are forgetting on a daily basis that we need each other.  We think we are teaching our children to be world-class leaders all the while their souls have no way of knowing how to tell their own truths, how to listen deeply to the truths of others or how to embrace a life that is tempered with balance and patience, grace and gratitude, compassion and a gentle willingness to yield to others.

I am so saddened by Boston and Newtown and Colorado and Blacksburg.  And I am even more grieved that we are too busy, too overwhelmed, too frightened, too stubborn, too selfish, too lost, too tired, too focused on things that will never evoke an ounce of generosity in this world to notice the man in his backyard burying his dog.

With a nod to Pete Seeger, I wonder:  Where have all the people gone?  Long time passing.  Where have all the people gone?  Long time ago.  Where have all the people gone?  They’ve gone to empty hearts everyone.  When will they ever learn?  When will we ever learn?