I remember growing up and listening to the song, “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.” It was so much fun to play it over and over again on the record player.
What innocence, what a time, when that is all I wanted. Wednesday Dec. 2, someone came into my office looking at his phone and saying, “I’ve got some bad news. It’s happened again.”
Another tragic shooting, this time in San Bernardino. 14 people gunned down while at a Holiday party; celebration and gratitude quickly turned into chaos and tragedy.
This has been played out in our country way too often. We have prayed for so many innocent victims of violence this year alone.
I agree with our president that, sadly, this has become the norm, and it’s not right. My heart is grieved, and I feel like we need to talk about our response to tragedy.
It’s important to acknowledge the terrible reality of mass shootings and tragedies, because only in facing what has happened can we move through the terror and experience the joy that is beyond heartbreak.
In response to the San Bernardino tragedy, and the way too many other tragedies, I asked our congregation to join me in prayer. Why pray?
We’ve been praying for thousands of years and still these things happen. And yet, prayer is the thing we can do. When compassion demands that we demonstrate care, prayer is one way we can always do that. And shared concern and compassion is a healing force in our lives and in our world. Edith Stein said, “Prayer is the highest achievement of which the human spirit is capable.”
Prayer is our affirmation that hope can be resurrected from the ashes of despair, that healing is possible in the aftermath of destruction, and that no matter what has been lost, something good remains, and if we find and focus on the good, it will multiply, and the days to come can be better than the ones behind us.
Abraham Heschel gave a great statement on what prayer can do. He said, “Prayer cannot bring water to parched land, nor mend a broken bridge, nor rebuild a ruined city; but prayer can water an arid soul, mend a broken heart, and rebuild a weakened will.”
We pray for all who have been hurt or terrorized by violence not because prayer will undo the past, but because it says to the hurting there are people standing with you, believing in your resilience, adding their tears to yours, and their hopes to yours, and in that moment of sharing, untold possibilities exist.
And so, we pray. We pray not to persuade God to do what She might otherwise be unwilling to do, but to persuade ourselves that our care and concern are still needed and still make a difference. We pray not to move God, but to motivate ourselves to be His healing hands in the world.
Prayer is also a way of remembering and there is power in remembrance. Sometimes we think that the spiritual thing to do is pretend that pain is less than it is. That doesn’t diminish pain but it does insult and often add to the pain of those suffering. The good news isn’t that pain doesn’t happen, but that pain isn’t the purpose of our lives and that it doesn’t get the last word.
The message of Easter isn’t that Golgotha didn’t happen, but that it wasn’t the last thing to happen! The message of Christmas isn’t that things are always easy, but that even when things are difficult, the divine presence is made manifest in the most unlikely of ways and places.
I’m not suggesting we focus on the tragedy, but that we focus on the possible remedy, and we can’t remedy the tragedy by ignoring it. We can’t fix the problem we won’t name.
We are optimists, but our optimism lies in overcoming the difficulty, not in pretending it didn’t happen. Let’s pray and work and call for systems where there are more reasonable controls on acquiring weaponry and easier access to quality mental health care. This is prayer in action.
Finally, prayer provides the space needed for healing. We so often want to rush to offer easy answers to the complexities and tragedies of life.
When we go through tragedy, I believe God is present in the tears shed, in the hugs shared, in the kindnesses offered, in the communities banding together to renew their hope and find strength in the midst of tragedy.
Peace and justice activist and progressive minister William Sloane Coffin lost his son in a car accident in 1983. A well-meaning person tried to comfort him by saying that God had called his son home. Coffin became furious and snapped, “The hell you say! God didn’t cause my son to die; when my son died God was the first one to shed a tear.”
That is the image of God I hold onto; not a God that causes pain or that could prevent it but refuses to; but rather, a God that stands with us in good times and bad, holding us always, flowing through us, expressing as us, and being most powerfully and noticeably present in our expressions of love.
What the hurting need today, more than anything else, is love. Prayer is one of the ways we can express that love.
Let’s join our hearts and spirits today – praying for those who are hurting. Affirming hope and wholeness for ourselves and others, and holding the frightened and grieving in loving-kindness.
Let there be peace on Earth.
