A week ago I wrote a response to Beslan’s recent tragedy. Since then, my reading and reflecting has taken me to other broken places - within myself, within the earth, within other people. Like this week, broken places often leave me quiet.

Poet Jean Janzen writes a poem by this same name - Broken Places - that evokes images I find nourishing at the end of a week like this. The power and gentleness of personified mountains, holding us, baptizing us in their own broken crags: my mind turns to god.

Here is the poem:

We know that the mountains
can’t heal us, even as they stand
beside us, serene after their own
great upheaval. And from the deep,

the hidden springs rise.
“For my irregular heart,” my father
said, soaking in the sulpherous pool,
the rain sizzling around him.

On the other side of the world
Mitsuko and I strip and scrub,
then enter the tranquil heat.
Like sisters, no need to speak,

for the water has claimed us,
holding us above the rush
of the river. All of us shipwrecked,
clutching what we can,

no cure except the final one.
But here, for awhile, our bodies release
the secret aches. Holding nothing
but water in our arms, we lean

against the split and tumbled sides
of rocks, here where the mountain’s heart
spills out, holding us in its own
broken place, the mists rising.

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 last year I met with a girlfriend once a week, and among many things, ended up talking a lot about Sue Monk Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter - a book about Kidd’s journey toward recovery and embrace of the sacred feminine. I’m not sure how it happened, but over time we came to refer to God as Big Mama.

One day as we discussed Big Mama, the image came to mind of a whale – like in the movie Whale Rider: silent, intuitively present, enormous, yet beautifully graceful. This struck us as a meaningful image for God. My mind then went to whale blubber, of all things, and then connected this with female breasts, and the memory of learning somewhere that breast tissue tends to absorb and collect poisons from our blood and the environment more so than other tissues in the body. My friend and I talked about the Whale and our Big Mama, absorbing our poisons into herself somehow – maybe even cleansing them and giving them back to us as milk.

The next day I was driving down the road and found myself – I hardly want to say it for fear of trampling the memory – held, somehow, at the breast of God. I felt held in an embrace, and like there was poison from deep, deep inside of me being drawn out…and into Her. I hadn’t been thinking anything particularly deep or profound when it happened; it just…happened. I passively "received" this gift. I cried and cried and cried – half because of the poison that was brushing into consciousness (wounds, fears, self-loathing), half because of joy and relief at not having to work or DO anything to make the healing happen.

I drove toward Home, a child at the bosom of Mama.

They say that chimps and humans share something like 99.4% of the same DNA, and it’s only the fractional difference that sets us apart. This must be all the more true between humans.

I feel this sometimes. I’ll be walking down the street and glance into a stranger’s eyes and, for just that moment, sense that she and I or he and I really are the same in the ways that matter.

But then the moment passes, and we glance away, and feel aware of how differently we’re dressed, or what different tasks we seem to be about, or how very dissimilar our backgrounds must be. We pass as strangers, in isolation.

Glimpses like these fuel a longing I carry around inside to connect. I long to literally and metaphorically lock eyes with friends and strangers in such a way that everything dividing us gets hushed, and the common ground we share – of loves and hopes and wounds and gladnesses, of angers, disappointments, deep, deep yearnings, of being children and lovers, enemies and friends, sexual beings, spiritual beings, listening-to-music beings, surviving junior high beings, of knowing what it feels like to shiver and sweat and laugh and cry – when all of this gets stretched as an enormous field around us. No words would have to clutter the landscape; it could just be there, like us, the silence heavy – or light – with all that makes us not alone.

Rilke wrote once that “at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone.” And it really feels this way a lot of the time. But the longing in me wants to claim just the opposite, and search hard to confirm the hunch.

Jen Lemen posted on her blog an article she recently found in Ode magazine. It’s called Healing the Africa Within Us. Check it out. Some really beautiful stuff there.