Prodigals Don't Always Leave By Choice

In the early summer of 2005, I traveled to Colombia with CPT.  Among so many others, we meet an older couple whose son was murdered 18 years previous because he went fishing on the wrong day in the wrong place – or so another man with a gun thought at the time.  I wonder if that man still lives and what he thinks of that life he took now.  I wonder if there were other lives taken.  I wonder the cost to him in the taking.  I wonder about wildernesses of our own making, we human-war-making beings.  These are the things I wonder now.

What I wrote, what I prayed at the time, was all about these parents growing old without their boy . . .

Dona Marcelena and Don Juan sit and speak quietly.  Don Juan tells us, “we do not manage the fear; the fear manages us,” describing nights of belly-gripping terror, spent listening to every sound of the forest, every rustling leaf a potential FARC, ELN or para.

O God, forgive us that in their old age, we visit on such folk fear and not peace, sorrow and not joy at a race well run.

They have had 16 children, but even 15 will not make up for the one who is missing from their table.

Prodigals do not always leave by choice.

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