The Unclad Soul

On NPR (National Public Radio) this morning they played a recording of a typical scene now where the Border Patrol is separating children from their parents.  I was in my car on my way to work. I heard babies crying, children screaming in tears. A Border officer is heard saying in Spanish, "We have an orchestra." It was a pathetic attempt to settle the distraught children terrified of being taken from their parents. The Trump administration is trying, unconvincingly, to dress the scene in quiet calm with children getting food and medicine, shelter and games. But let’s be honest. These are no substitutes for a child being taken from their parents. You can sit them in front of a circus of dancing elephants and they will still cry for their mother and father. The president is cynically blaming Democrats, or saying he’s protecting the country from the drug cartel, or whatever sort of baloney he wants to embellish, but the truth is, and please, everyone can see this, the pre...

The masterminds of 911, whether they intended to be or not, were geniuses. Not because they managed in the most terrifying way to collapse the Twin Towers but because their hideous act successfully severed our nation from its bearings. They didn’t just viciously murder nearly 3,000 Americans and temporarily shut down various financial institutions and disrupt the flow of commerce for a while. That wasn’t their goal. They created an ominous, debilitating, relentless fear among us. A terrorizing fear that still to this day remains in force in the lives of so many Americans. A fear writhing and twisting in hate. An irrational fear. A fear that gallops headstrong through our churches and schools, our Congress, our businesses and our homes. And that fear has made us so distrusting of people, so neurotically detached from reality, so emotionally hardened, bigoted and vengeful, that it is in many ways destroying us. That’s what terror is supposed to do. Weaken. Cripple. Confound. Torment. Di...

This comment is the best I've seen so far regarding the Boston tragedy. It comes from retired Anglican Bishop the Rev. Steven Charleston. It was posted on my friend Dale McNeil's page. "Why? Why the pointless cruelty, O God? Why the premeditated evil that comes to bring death, pain and sorrow to innocent lives and leaves us stunned to imagine a heart so cold it could conceive such an act? We cannot understand it, God, we cannot make sense of the senseless. And how should we respond even if we did understand? Tooth for tooth, eye for eye, would it end the madness or return the lost to live again? Come, Spirit of God, come stand with us in this darkness. Hold the fallen in your arms. Heal the injured. Comfort the broken-hearted. And if you cannot tell us why we do this to ourselves, show us how to love more deeply, that such pain will never be the final word, but rather mercy that needs no explanation."

I come to this moment to remember the children and their teachers who were so brutally and senselessly killed last week at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I come seeking, with you, consolation, because the enormity of this fiendish act challenges the capacity of either human or divine comfort. Novelist David Gemmell has disturbingly said, "If there is one sound that follows the march of humanity, it is the scream." We feel that truth today.  And all of us hear that scream.  It is the scream of terrified children helplessly vulnerable to a deranged killer.  It is the scream of heroic teachers giving up their lives in the ultimate act of protecting their students.  It is the scream of parents and spouses and other children and family members engulfed in tears and broken with grief.  It is the scream of a community and a town embittered and angry by an unthinkable violation of all of their values and dreams and efforts at cre...