As parents and grandparents, teachers and churchgoers, Portlanders and people in general, we find ourselves once again on the day after a shooting in a school in a church. This time in Minnesota. And, at this tender time of first days of kindergarten, and fifth grade, and ninth grade, and freshman year in college. How do any of us manage to let go, to close the door, and to say goodbye to our children? Yet, we do it for many reasons, including that we cannot nourish life’s flourishing by keeping our children walled off from all that is outside… love and danger… play and harm… beauty and brokenness.
Most days, our children return to us with stories of how their lives unfolded, whether they share with glee or reluctantly. Yesterday, some parents didn’t get to receive their children home at all.
May the families and the community of the Annunciation Catholic School be surrounded by their community’s love in healing ways.
In the pain and anguish of grief rising, may poetry serve as a spiritual guide to help us to begin to make meaning of what is senseless. I offer two such guides in the form of Clint Smith’s poem “We See Another School Shooting on the News” and May Sarton’s poem “All Souls” below.
We See Another School Shooting on the News
by Clint Smith
and I don’t know how I am ever
supposed to let you
out of my sight. I think about
those children, how they woke
up and had breakfast that morning
as they did all mornings
before: half-eaten Pop-Tarts and eggs
in a coat of ketchup. How they insisted
on wearing their favorite shirt even
though it was covered in stains.
How they tied their shoes and double
knotted them, just to be sure.
How they smiled when they saw
their friends on the bus, and told
them about the soccer game they’d had
that weekend, the goal they scored
How none of them could ever have
known what was coming.
I fear everything I cannot control
and know that I control nothing.
I am standing in a thunderstorm
attempting to shield you from
every jagged slice of yellow sky.
I am trying to inhale all the smoke
from this burning world while
asking you to hold your breath.
—
All Souls
by May Sarton
Did someone say that there would be an end,
an end, Oh, an end to love and mourning?
What has been once so interwoven cannot be raveled,
nor the gift ungiven.
Now the dead move through all of us still glowing.
Mother and child, lover and lover mated,
are wound and bound together and enflowing.
What has been plaited cannot be unplaited–
only the strands grow richer with each loss
and memory makes kings and queens of us.
Dark into light, light into darkness, spin.
When all the birds have flown to some real haven,
we who find shelter in the warmth within,
listen and feel new-cherished, new-forgiven,
as the lost human voices speak through us and blend our complex love,
our mourning without end.
—
Take good care of yourselves and your communities in these tenderest of times and know that you can always make a pastoral appointment with one of our ministers or one of our lay ministers. We are here with you on good days and on the toughest ones.
In faith,
Rev. Alison