TODAY

I got used to having to teach my Sunday School kids after school shootings, this being America. Jesus weeps, the innocent suffer. This weekend, a college campus, a synagogue in Australia, a cherished celebrity couple in Los Angeles. (And God almighty, the sickness and indecency of our president’s response to the latter.)

The kids feel helpless and hopeless after these shooting, and I do, too. I always share with them the old Annie saws, which is what I am going to share with you here—I remind them of what Mr. Roger’s mother said, that in the face of tragedy and hopelessness we look to the helpers, the profound and immediate presence of the first responders, the people serving them coffee and sandwiches through the night. I remind them of how we as a people, a community, a nation come together with incredible courage and generosity of spirit in the aftermath of shootings, floods, fires. I remind them that grace bats last, as spiritual WD-40, as second winds, as water wings.

I’ve written so many times and in so many places that I do believe there is ultimate meaning in the chaos, and also in the doldrums, although possibly not today right after lunch. Although there is suffering, there is also new life. We learn to dance again, with limps, after our hearts break their legs. That is why people with big hearts show up with almost unfathomable caring and life force—volunteering to clean up beaches after an oil spill or make casseroles for neighbors when they are mourning the loss of a loved one. Stitch by stitch, we patch things together.

I remind them of something my buddy Ram Dass said, that we are all just walking each other home. We look to see who around us most needs help. Often, all we can do is not turn away, and that is so brave and inspiring.

As my Jesuit friend Tom Weston always reminds me, we do what’s possible: We grieve for families for whom this weekend will remain the end of their world. We cry or shut down, we blame, despair, rage, pray; gather in community. We donate to causes of people fighting against institutional cruelty and the fetishized worship of guns. Some of us can’t eat at all, some of us binge, some of us can’t turn off the TV, some of us can’t turn it on. These are all appropriate. We gasp and gawk, talk, spew, stick together. We make ourselves get up and go for walks.

Today I woke up in prayer, for change and peace and healing and semi-okayness, and at lunch I am going to have a Sopranos binge with a bedridden friend.

Always after these catastrophic events, we are gentler, more patient and kind with each other, and that’s a small miracle. It means something of the spirit is at work. For me, that is grace made visible. It doesn’t come immediately, or by bumper sticker, and it doesn’t come naturally. What comes naturally is rage and blame. Blame 'R' Us. But love and hope do come when we feel and see with our own eyes that families, towns, nations heal, resurrect.

It takes time. I so hate this and do not agree to this, but have no alternative, because it is truth: it will take time. Time takes time. And in the meantime, always always always always, we take care of the poor.

Life is much wilder, sweeter, violent, heartbreaking, weirder, richer, more insane, awful, beautiful and profound than we were prepared for as children, or that I am comfortable with as a grownup. In my Sunday School classes after tragedy, we always spend extra time making art—cards for children in the towns where shootings took place, or for the people in the regular church whose hearts are broken. Someone said that art is the greatest expression of the human spirit; my kids are glitter glue cantors. We’ve made garlands out of coffee filters to string in our fellowship hall, to remind people of peace and buoyancy. The paradox is that in the face of our meager efforts, we discover that in the smallest moments of taking in and making beauty, in actively being people of goodness and mercy and outreach, we are saved.