ONE MORE WALK "Together"

While I don't tend to hold a lot of dates in my head, I do remember December 14, 2012. My parents were traveling from Ohio to my sister’s home in South Carolina so that we could all be together a few days before Christmas. Before leaving for South Carolina that afternoon, I heard the horrific news of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. My parents, however, because of their traveling, had not heard the news and had no idea about a place called Sandy Hook or how it was now forever scratched into our collective memory as a country. They entered my sister's home with the joy and expectation that the Christmas season often brings: opening presents, sharing a wonderful meal, and the blessing of spending time with loved ones they had not seen in a long while. My mother especially, loved Christmas and the sharing of gifts. So convoluted and disruptive was my thinking, that I remember feeling bad and hesitant about spoiling her joy by sharing the news. I couldn’t hold together the feelings and emotions that such a day presented. I never wanted to open presents less. I didn't know how to embrace the joy that was ours while other families in Sandy Hook had some of their greatest joy ripped from them. And at the same time, I wanted to cherish the moments we were sharing as a family. Trying to hold the joy of being with my family and the horrific loss at Sandy Hook was impossible. It made no sense how so much wonderful and the worst possible kind of awful could be happening on the same day, in the same world.

And yet, this seems to be the way life moves and gives, simultaneously, joy and suffering happening at the same time, all the time. While one family celebrates a joyful reunion, another family's world is obliterated by a school shooting. Wonderful birthdays and anniversaries are happy, jubilant gatherings while at the same time, bombs are destroying Ukrainian homes, hospitals, and schools. Delicious meals are prepared and offered in the company of life-giving fellowship while at the very same moment, prompted by a war that will not go away, Middle Eastern families are blindsided by attacks and terror, losing not only their homes and livelihood but loved ones they will never share table fellowship with again. The harvest and bounty of summer gardens make way for canning, plentiful farmers' markets, and freezers packed full for winter, while at the very same time and season, in another state or country, earthquakes, fires, and hurricanes destroy crops, make water unattainable, and have children scrounging in the dirt for anything that looks like food. Honest, courageous, thoughtful, and respectful listening is being offered and shared in coffee shops, at bible studies, Sunday school classes, in book clubs, on college campuses, and among those who value their relationships more than they value being right, while at the same time those serving on our town councils, state legislatures, and Congress struggle to communicate, refusing to work with those "on the other side."

And if we don't feel this throbbing tension here, I do think we feel it closer to home. After the death of a loved one, we catch ourselves laughing at a funny memory only to feel guilty for doing so. We scream at our child for running out in the middle of the road while hugging them, with everything in us, for dear life. We growl at our spouse for not going to the doctor because we want to have more years together rather than a few. We take out a loan to pay for a child's college education or make travel possible in retirement. Or maybe we risk losing the love and favor of those we care for because we believe the need to speak up or act justly is vital to the well-being of all. Even close to home, we're asked to simultaneously hold joy and suffering, abundance and scarcity, blessing and fear. It's enough on some days to cause me to run home, lock my doors, and take up knitting.

But this is what I know. Life will always be full of both. Joy and suffering, abundance and scarcity, blessing and fear they all live in the same house. We can't get out of this life without knowing and experiencing their simultaneous tension and presence. No matter how much we may want to create lives of isolation, turn a deaf ear to the world's horrendous need, or circle the wagons in an effort to protect our joy and security, it can't be done. Oh, we can choose to be apathetic, self-centered, greedy, and uncaring. But even those of us who have built fortresses of self-preservation and protection will be affected by the frailties and suffering this world brings. None of us get a free pass. Whether it be something that visits us personally or happens to someone we may never meet or know, Suffering's room is right next to Joy's. And there's not a new house anywhere where it will be different.

Which of course is why all of this is so hard. If only we could hold joy without feeling guilty for all those who have no or so little joy at all. If only we could reside in gratitude without any awareness of what so many others have lost or may never have. Maybe if joy and sorrow were not happening, simultaneously all the time we'd manage better. "Today, I will enjoy my blessings. Tomorrow I will sob at what I saw on the news." Not very helpful, is it?

But what I do believe is helpful is the thinking of my friend, Carol Wilson. If I understand right, Carol believes that in place of wrestling to hold joy and suffering together, as if we're trying to shove them in a box, forcing them to fit, or pitting them against one another, prompting competing emotions, joy and suffering can be held together lightly, as they come, as they are. In place of trying to deny or negate one's joys in light of the world's sufferings, hold them both as they are. Rejoice, celebrate, and give God thanks for every good and wondrous blessing, and at the same time sob, grieve, question, and pray for every horror and loss we learn of and see. They are not in competition. Instead, when gently embraced together they nurture and feed the other. Our joys and blessings grant us the agency, energy, fuel, vision, and grace to respond faithfully to the many needs before us and the world. The world's suffering and need confront our apathy, stir our creativity for problem-solving, connect us with people and stories different from our own, help us get in touch with our own particular gifts that we may share, and deepen our desire for compassion and service. I think you could care-fully say, that they deepen our sense and awareness of how we understand blessing.

Holding joy and suffering, at the same time, will never come easy. Yet, if we do, choosing to hold them "together," as they are, as they come, we may discover that in place of paralysis, isolation, or being stymied by overwhelming feelings, we will become agents of healing, comfort, life, love, and grace. When I look back on December 14, 2012, what I didn't know then, that I know now, is that it was the last Christmas we shared with my mother. I try now to hold that day as it came, with suffering and blessing, joy and unimaginable loss. I do so mindful that every blessing my mother poured into me granted me the ability to not look away and care when a tragedy occurred. I do so ever mindful that God is holding this world and all of us in it. It's just as Corrie Ten Boom believed “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. God holds all of us, each of us, and all that this life has to give. Every joy, every suffering, God is holding it all.

Blessings, Leslee