Christina

It’s all so troubling. It’s such a strange sensation to listen to a news report talking about someone you knew and loved with such cold, objective terms. “A woman was found dead in her apartment.” People are troubled and the neighbors are uneasy, and this is bothersome to us because we don’t want them to be uncomfortable; we want them to care. “Don’t you see? We knew her. She was someone with whom we grew up and experienced things, and with whom we laughed and lived and tasted and smelled and saw, and with whom we felt our mutual realities with our nerves as well as our deeper sensing parts. Can’t you understand that?” We want their insides to get a little torn up. We want to tell everyone we know what has happened because we want them to feel it too- this scraping, scratching, gnawing feeling. Even more so, we want to feel it ourselves.

Things can seem so bad on a large scale and then something tragic happens to drive it home. You realize you’ve been ignoring other people’s news reports. Tragedy grabs you by the shirt collar, gets in your face and shrieks, “I am real!” So you’ve got this evil villain right here, so close you smell its reeking, panting breath, but what are you supposed to do? Sometimes there are no words to articulate these thoughts that you haven’t quite formulated and these racing, sharp emotions that scuff and nick at you but won’t cut you deep enough for you to feel satisfied with your grief. And maybe you wail or cry uncontrollably, but sometimes I just sit and try to squeeze out even one tear but it just won’t come. It won’t come out. It’s too much, this happens too much, too many times. Oh, God, we just try to walk through life but there’s all this molten lava around our feet and we’re getting assailed from all sides and even the air is toxic to breathe. So our lungs hurt and our eyes are stinging and our fingers have gotten burned so many times that we can’t even feel things anymore. We can’t feel things and we can’t see our fingerprints. We barely know who we are and so much of this precious, limited time is spent on simply trying to survive. And on top of all this, we are so tired. And people have terminal diseases and girls are anorexic and the holocaust really happened and governments are corrupt and friends malign each other and we’re all so selfish and people who love each other hurt each other the most and beauty is perverted and raped and consumed and we hate ourselves and everything is backwards and inside-out of the way it should be.

And I’m sitting here wringing my tear ducts, trying to cry, but all I want to do is punch something and scream “damn it!” but then I realize that even this exclamation is fruitless because it already is. This whole thing is already damned, it seems.

And I guess it’s proverbially “darkest before dawn,” but all this talk of dawn and hope and “working together for good” seems to minimize and render banal the heaviness we’re all experiencing right now. All of us. The whole bloody planet.

So God, would you help me to feel it? Would You come in here with us and help us to know that You’re in the midst of it too? And would You tell us what to do next? Because maybe You’re already reaching in and maybe You’re already trying to help, but we’re just humans. We’re just these frightened animals. You’re just so big, and all we can see is what’s directly in front of us. Maybe You’re helping but all we feel sometimes is pain so it’s scary and overwhelming. So come closer and come smaller and simpler because we’re feeble and weak and fatigued and broken and at a loss. Come gently and softly and tenderly, but please do come. Please come quickly.