The grief-stricken face of a father carrying the bloodied body of a child met me this morning as I raised my newspaper from its sunny spot on the porch. As I read, a tea kettle sang in the next complex over, and birds from branches and treetops nearby. While I slept last night, over 200 people got killed in the “ending” (as the headline reads) of the hostage crisis in Beslan, Russia.

Dear God…dear God. The crisis has not ended. That father’s face, the frightened faces of the surviving children (arms clutched around each other’s necks), the face of a mother, stroking her dead boy’s cheek… No, the crisis has not ended. Dear God, it’s just begun.

Until the last few years, I lived believing the world is largely a fearful place: full of bad, bad things, bad, bad people, and opportunities to be alone when help is most needed. Tumbling through my crisis of faith a few years ago, I discovered a wall of rage inside as well, directed at a God who seems conspicuously absent where help is most required. Explanations as to why an all-loving, all-powerful God would sit passively back (or even with tears in his or her eyes), watching us suffer our horrors: for me, these all fell flat. Either that God doesn’t exist, I concluded, or…doesn’t deserve to.

A hundred books, a million conversations, three years of therapy, and mountains of reflection later, I’ve mostly released that God from my angry clutches. I’m learning to trust that if there is a God – defined in whatever anthropomorphic or nonanthropomorphic ways that can be done – that God is not a jerk. God is not a jerk. If I’m to be sane, I have to believe it.

So I sit with these pictures, this morning, and the knowledge that Beslan is howling with grief and fear and rage. I don’t know how to see God in the mess. But I add my voice to Beslan’s, and envision our wail as a massive, human prayer, rising from all the horrors that have been and ever will be.

And in this act, I see that each of us is far, far from alone.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 4th, 2004 at 10:22 am and is filed under Current Affairs, Mindfulness, Religion/Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.