The litany of sadness and brokenness that seems woven throughout our 24/7 news-soaked daily lives occasionally still manages to shock. Sometimes the scale of the horrors visited on our planet, and the immediacy of camera, satellite and internet, create levels of information and graphic image that we simply have to filter them down to more emotionally manageable proportions. Compassion, moral revulsion, sympathy, anger, sadness, helplessness, hope, faith, all those feelings and passions that identify us as human, humane; if allowed full expression all the time would make despair and spiritual ennui inevitable.
Yet. There are times, usually when tragedy becomes personal, and touches the deepest places of our vulnerability and hopefulness, when we are, again, shocked and deeply, painfully aware of our feelings. I’m not the only one whose sense of what is important in life, what is real, valuable, to be cherished and never taken for granted, is heightened by occasions of brutal waste, when nothing can explain such senseless loss. Catherine and Ben Mullany loved each other, were on honeymoon on a Paradise island, had life and joy ahead of them, and no doubt their share of – well no one can know. I heard the news that Ben had died with a distressingly ambiguous confusion of emotions: relieved for him, profoundly saddened at the death of two people in love, angry at the needless anguish of so many people, and wondering again, yet again, what it means to live our lives in such a random, risky, world where beauty of love and lethal violence can inhabit the same few square metres of a honeymoon bedroom.
Over the years I have taken enough funerals to know that the bewildering loss of bereavement, the disorientation and chronic ache of what seems a forever inconsolable absence, are part of the inhernent cost of love, passionate, long-faithful, life-shaping and self-surrendering – love. But when death comes from an act of callous violence, unlooked for, undeserved, inexplicable – then a further layer of despair-inducing misery falls on those left to cope with the aftermath of such loss. I pray tonight for those who now have to care for two bereaved families – three weeks ago celebrating a wedding. I pray for those two families, and wonder how any words, gestures or decisions can make any of this better, easier, less hellish But it may be that with the gifts of faithful presence, wise restraint of well-meaning words too quickly said, and tears which share both the baffled silence and raging anger, God will bring the touch of divine mercy through human compassion. As often now, when words don’t work, I hold my holding cross and think with compassion in the presence of Christ crucified and risen, and believe that even in such God-forsaken anguish, these two families will find strength, the beginnings of comfort, and in time some healing.
Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy
Leave a Reply