Why Is the Knowing So Costly?

For in much wisdom is much grief, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.  –Ecclesiastes 1.18

Blissful ignorance –
you state of happy
unknowing
Donde estas?
Gone . . .
gone . . .
erased slowly
with each bit of
knowledge achieved . . .
of wisdom received

Why is the knowing so costly?
The question percolates up
to the place where wisdom
and grief
knowledge
and sorrow
meet and dance

Why so costly?
How could it be otherwise?

________________________
Written in 2005, I pondered then as I ponder now the place of blissful ignorance and the cost of knowing the cost to others of the actions I take as they ripple into this world of which I am a citizen too.  Yes, knowledge is costly, as it should be.

I Can Only Imagine

When tornadoes and tsunamis and gunmen interrupt the world, it is the children who capture our hearts and imaginations, we who stand on the other side of the dividing line that is ever present between we who have lost and we who have not.  Every parent’s fear became reality for too many today and today and today and a dividing line stands between us, for we on the ‘safe side’ of the line can only dress rehearse the horror, as if it were a talisman of protection to imagine the unimaginable.  For those whose children have died, sorrow.  For those whose have not, embrace of the day, for there is no safety in tomorrow.  And I, still on this side of the line, can only imagine.

There you stand

on the other side

of the line that

divides us –

always will –

until it doesn’t

That line of before

and after where

the beforeness of

you imagines that

it will never be

that you are me

that place of pride

where you stand

with your child

safely at your side

looking with just

a bit of fear over

the line at me –

who just a moment

ago stood with you

but now –

now I can never go

back to the land

of certainty

the land of the 

smug unaware

claiming 

not me

not me

the other side

where a child

stands at my side

no longer

is lonely territory

the other side

is the screaming

place and there is

no comfort and you

would not come to

me even if you

could – I would not

ask you to – it would

be too cruel to ask

that you stand with

me bereft of your

children

Rachel is not the 

only one who weeps

you know

Not Much Else

Yesterday morning was largely spent blogging about drones and our failure to examine the wisdom of a policy of killing people termed enemies from afar.  It was a computer morning, with lots of research at my fingertips.

The afternoon, by contrast, was person-to-person: dropping off some food and visiting with an older couple then visiting with a family saying good-bye to a beloved dear one in the end stage of life – a life too soon taken by the vagaries and injustice of cancer.

All politics may be local, but all grief is global – none escape it.

And what occurs to me in reflecting on my day spent amidst so much grief and pain is that life itself brings so much challenge, so many tears, that I wonder that we would add to the mix with our own contribution to the grief of self and others.

Before going to seminary, a preacher I know would often say to my many questions, “It’s not a salvation issue and God will take care of it.”

She frustrated the nonsense out of me at the time, but I have grown to new appreciation of that wisdom.  So much I fret about resides in the hands of God.  So often when I want to get something ‘right’, it’s about telling another that they’re wrong.  So often when I want to ‘know’ for sure, what I really want is reassurance that in the court of public opinion, I am the winner.  So often what I worry about doesn’t matter at all.

Sitting with the dying and their loved ones reminds me of that: most of what I sweat day-to-day really doesn’t matter at all.  And God will take care.  So what does God need of me?  My helping hands, and, I suspect, not much else.

Where Levi Walked

In a little while, I will go and
stand with family and friends
as they remember their Levi,
gone a year now – was it today?

I will watch they who watched
Levi go from boy to man
they who hold the picture memories
so close in their hearts – always
the smiles are what grab and hold

smiling Levi holding a crab up
to the camera . . . smiling Levi
posing for the senior picture
perfect moment picture –
so much more important
than he could have ever guessed

It is that smile I remember
on the face of the boy-man
I barely knew but who
inhabits my refrigerator along
with so many others still here,
smiling new picture memories

I will go to the woods today
I will walk where Levi walked
and I will stand – for a time –
with those who love him best –
witness to their love, their loss

Grief

Grief . . .
      the wall
           of the ocean
                that is always
                     behind you
and you know
      you always know
           it’s coming
                it’s coming
                     it’s coming
and
      it
           is
                going
                     to
                          knock
                               you
                                    down

Flickr Commons

Iowa Schmiowa

My friend Stu died on Wednesday.  It is only Friday and already, it seems so very, very long ago.  Life continues apace on planet earth . . . people shop at the store and silly as well as serious discussions carry on even among us, those who mourn.

And the news keeps spinning out.

Last night, or was it this morning?  I think it was this morning . . . there was the usual US Presidential race coverage on television, only now, it was about New Hampshire instead of Iowa.  Did Iowa already happen?  I ask the fellow mourner sitting beside me on the couch.  I don’t know and I don’t care, she replied.

I thought about that for a moment.  Me neither, was my equable answer.  And it was true.  I really don’t care whether the Republican candidates have already been to Iowa or not.  I really don’t care who won and who’s claiming they won, even though they didn’t.

When did ‘news’ become a nation’s soap opera?  When did it become that you could simply fill in the blanks to never-ending and never-changing narrative?  When did our news become about the unimportant, the trivial?  And when did the really important things get pushed away to make room for the drivel we dub ‘news’?

I wasn’t looking that day.

I should have liked to have a vote in our collective decision to be held captive to the irrelevant by the irresponsible.

I wasn’t looking that day.

I’m sure Iowa is a lovely place to live and meaning no disrespect, I have to say . . .

Iowa, Schmiowa . . .

Rachel Weeps: On the Loss of a Child

A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, 

Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, 

because they are no more.

                                                    –Matthew 2.18
                                                      (quoting Jeremiah31.15)

On the Roman Catholic calendar, today is the Feast Day remembering the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, the boy children who, in the Matthean narrative of the birth of Christ, are the collateral damage to Herod’s effort to find and kill the Messiah.

On such a day, it is common and appropriate to remember the thousands and hundreds of thousands of children who die each year from poverty, as casualties of war, living in refugee camps, as part of the exploitation and human trafficking that views children as commodity rather than human being to be treasured.

But this Feast Day, the trembling of Rachel’s shoulders seems much closer to home than what even horrifying statistics can convey.

My own father died of cancer in 1993.  He was in his early 60's and his own mother, my Grandma, in her 80's.

For all my sorrow at my own loss and my sadness for my mother’s loss of her husband, it is always the vision of my Grandma, Dad’s own mother, that draws my mind’s eye backward to that time.

I can still remember Grandma standing there at the casket, alone, allowing herself no comfort from any quarter.

Grandma hovering over the body of her baby boy is the loneliest sight I have ever seen.

A mother then myself, I understood and my heart broke for her . . . no parent, no matter how old, should have to stand in such a place mourning such a loss.

This feast day, this day set aside to remember those murdered out of the fear and jealousy of a tyrant who would be threatened by a toddler, I am mindful of all the parents who have stood and watched as their own children have returned to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

However your own child was lost to you . . . whether in the vagaries of the madness of war . . . or the puzzling loss of the body turned against itself with disease . . . car accidents or random unexpected tragedy . . . suicide or homicide . . .

This day and always, my prayers are with you.  I can only try to imagine the depth of your loss.  I know not the source of your comfort.  I hate that you have suffered in such a way.  I ache for your loneliness.  And I cling to the belief that God stands ever at your side as you keep your own vigils, weeping your tears, crying your anguish.  I know not whether there be any comfort in that presence.  I only know that you and your pain are not forgotten and neither is the one you loved so much that you risked giving life where it might be taken away.

May Comfort and Peace find you and grant you rest.