on shattered things

 There is no place where earth's sorrows
are more felt than in heaven.

According to CNN, 566 people were found dead today in Syria. Dead from war, a six day campaign in the area.

And a few days ago, this:

How to make sense of it all. To really realize that we aren't at all promised tomorrow, even the next moment. To realize that we can never truly know the heart of another person we share this earth with, but somehow must love them anyway. To even begin to let that word - mercy - reverberate around the chambers of your heart because it can't fit in your head.

How to walk down that sidewalk again? How do we not see death around every corner? How do we stand, tall and proud and strong, hate choking the life out of this world? How do we keep our hearts pure, and not be devoured by evil?

There are humvees rolling down the street and soldiers with assault rifles and blood on a sidewalk I've walked down a hundred times and shrapnel and a dead 8 year old and a father suddenly taken and at the center of it all, a family. 

Maybe it's because I'm away from my home, away from these streets and the thick of it, but I don't feel rage or acute hate, I feel a kind of deep down sadness. We can hardly look at this, it hurts too much, like looking right at the sun. But when I do, I see a 19-year-old boy. A 19-year-old boy, too young to even know who he is, somehow filling his heart up to the brim with enough evil to do this. When does a heart stop beating good and starts beating evil?

I wake up on a Saturday and hear how they finally caught him, huddled and hiding and dying in a boat, it feels like the morning after Good Friday.

At Mass this morning, because I don't live in Massachusetts right now, the priest didn't talk about it. He told a story about a little sheep that every day went further and further out of the fold and away from the good shepherd until one day he was so far the wolf devoured him. How much does the good shepherd mourn for the lost one?

 

I sit in church today and I listen to the homily, run my fingers over the smooth pages, the short gospel. He's talking about shepherds and all I picture are the cattlemen out here. The Levis and the rough hands and the dirt-caked boots and dusty wide-brimmed hat and the crinkly face, tanned by the prairie sun.

I picture the Good Shepherd like this. And my Jesus becomes so gritty and raw and real that he's right there in the mud and blazing hot earth sun with us.

Easter Mass, Vatican, 2013

More and more, I'm learning that there is only one thing, truly, that we can hold on to. When my students' stories get to be too much, and the world itself is too much, I can always find solace in the cross. I say it now and I'll have to preach it to myself every moment of every day for the rest of my life.

When everything is shattered and the whole world is falling apart, the cross is still held together. The Cross still holds all shattered things together.