When Words Wound

In remembrance of the 7 young lives lost in the recent Halifax house fire

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Dear Alex,

My daughter is sick today again.  My husband too.  Different symptoms but largely for reasons unclear.  In search to know and decode the mystery, I have exhausted many options, the least of which cost me my monthly wage.  There are no easy solutions from the experts.  

I am not a pain guru.  I don’t need to be one to feel my daughter’s pain.  Not exactly as she knows it of course in her precise intensity and kind.  In truth, nobody fully knows the pain of one or another.  Words may deepen the wound.  

Last night, you reflected in Dear Eugene on the Syrian refugee father in critical care, his grief magnified in photographs of lost faces and charred house beams to “speak the unspeakable”.  I will not presume to understand the questions and reasons for the unknown or familiar.  

What I do know is the strangeness of our proximity in knowing and feeling with the other in deep sorrow.  We recall not by isolated facts but in emotions relayed and received.  I will likely forget the reported names and history of the Syrian family.  I do remember feeling unjust about the magnitude of loss which I could not imagine to bear.  Why them, not me or you? 

And what about the spontaneity of bad things burning up the good?  Kikkan Randall, the first American gold medalist in cross-country skiing, plunged from her Olympic peaks to the diagnosis of cancer 3 months later.  No one, not the fittest or boldest, dodges the least expected in the best of seasons. 

My hours of the day are already burning up as evening will soon soften the pace of routine.  I do not know how or when the surviving parents may rest on the second night of their immeasurable tragedy and in some ways ours too.  The heart is a paradox of endurance.  It is most brittle in loss, elastic in grieving.  Come alongside with the family, with you, in shared silence to approach pain because hearts in huddle help gift and be granted rest.  

Yours, Kate 

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Dear Kate,

I am not sure if I want to say more about this family.  Even less so the passing of a 41-year-old father who killed his 11-year-old daughter.  Or the 10-hour fire that so far killed at least 4 scores in the old district of Bangladesh’s capital.  Don't you find these numbers appalling?  Numbers with meaning, painful, ugly meaning?

What is the point of speaking about such "tragedies" anyway?  In fact I was asked this question many times by readers of my blog.

True enough, if I say I am going to start a fundraising initiative for this Syrian family, one would then likely find my words more purposeful.  There needs to be a positive spin on negative happening or else what's the point to go beyond the news reporting?  We know it is bad news, knew that already 2 days ago; now what?  Let's do something about it.

When you come across a storyteller -

Know a house is being destroyed.

This is how things work in our world.  We want happy endings, don't want to dwell on sadness, absolutely need to rid of grief.  I can imagine publishers keeping a close watch on the surviving parents of this Syrian family and see if somehow a universal story of human triumph can be spun out of their surviving and give birth to a bestseller.  (But the story can't be focused on their religious sentiment, no way.  First it won't sell; second it will count against them.)

Now I am talking cynically, I know you can tell.  But I ain't even trying.  It really is how things are.

Even in church, if we are going to talk about these "tragedies," what are we going to talk about anyway?  That we will "pray" for these "victims," appeal to some deity, some faceless and probably care-less god far and away from us, housed in his air-conditioned CEO Office of Religious Affairs?  Mostly we would just stay away entirely from such hypocrisy and not even pretend to care enough to pray about.

It's not right to say something that we don't mean, don't feel, don't mind.  We call that honesty, being "authentic," the biggest virtue this part of the world, the most comfortable part.  We sell only what sells: happiness.  Advertisement is our chief discourse, story of "progress" our most refined oratory on the pulpit of self and collective awareness.

There was nothing attractive about him,

     nothing to cause us to take a second look.

He was looked down on and passed over, 

     a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.

"Man of Sorrows," that's a name of Jesus.  A party-pooper.  A Facebook post that gets no Likes.  Words that shouldn't be written.  A walking talking bundle of negative energy.  So let's not dwell on that "Lamb of God" talk and go right to his triumph, his conquering and paying for my sin, a winning that we take a great share of in our search to live triumphantly now and a ticket to heaven secured fully finally of course.

A prophet pronounces: "Christians will be found in the neighbourhood of Jesus – but Jesus is found in the neighbourhood of human confusion and suffering, defencelessly alongside those in need. If being baptized is being led to where Jesus is, then being baptized is being led towards the chaos and the neediness of a humanity that has forgotten its own destiny."

We have forgotten our destiny, our "universal story of human triumph."  As Christians, are we truly cured of our forgetfulness?

Yours, Alex