LES GRENOUILLES

Apparently if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water it will jump out – but if you put a frog into a pot of cool water, put it on the stove, and turn the heat on, it will sit there comfortably and soak until eventually it boils to death. I have heard this, but I have never tested it. I imagine it is probably true.

I haven’t looked at my mail in two weeks. I might have inherited a fortune, I might be about to lose my house, I really don’t know, I really don’t care. I think this is called depression. I’m not sure where I caught it, but it seems that every other person I talk to has it or is taking something for it. It’s my first time, but it’s definitely going around – it might qualify for epidemic. I’m washing my hands of a lot of things, and trying not to spread it.

My mind is bubbling with information overload and is signaling emergency shut down. My body is lethargic with compassion fatigue and wants to stay in bed. My spirit is weary of well-doing, and wants to stay in a warm bath for a year. All my senses are hot and stimulated, on high alert, but I just can’t sort out what to do about it. Circuits are shorting out. I can’t process any more data. I’m wishing life came with a pause button, but I would settle for simmer.

I am considering the possibility that I might be slowly boiling to death.

If there is anything that draws out the I don’t have enough feeling in me, it is the Christmas season. Five dollars here, ten dollars there, starving children, homeless people, drug addicted women in shelters, soup kitchens, coats for kids, mitten trees, shoe boxes, kettles, building funds, bursary funds, foundations, gift exchanges, baking with the good stuff, wrapping paper, secret Santas, loved ones near and far – it adds up. I want to give to it all, but I can’t – my heart is generous, but I still feel selfish.

Everywhere I am hearing, You are among the most blessed, you are so rich, you have so much. Who are you, to say ‘no’? I find myself suddenly ranting to a Tim Horton’s employee about the exorbitant price of the medium Mint Mocha Latte that I thought I might treat myself with to maybe help me out of the doldrums into festive. Inside I am scolding myself; The money for that coffee might have been spent on the poor. Without warning, I am barking at my kids for eating the cookies I made for the neighbours, and now I have to go buy more chocolate.

It isn’t about money. If it were about money, it would not be an issue. That you either have in your pocket, or you don’t. It is about having to choose where your limited resources are going to go, when you don’t know how to choose. It is about too many choices.

Until this past Friday, I actually thought that I had lost the capacity to care. I thought I had over-spent all my compassion. I thought maybe I was all out of love. I couldn’t find a mite to offer – I already gave everything I had to live on, and my emotions operate on a very tight, fixed income. Really, what does it even profit you to gain the will to care, if you have lost the means?

But I have discovered that I do care. I care so very much, I have not been able to stop crying. And I have discovered that I am not depressed – I am sad. I am sad, and I should be sad and, Christmas or not, it is perfectly alright if I walk around for the next good while just feeling very, very sad. I would have to question my humanity if I were not sorrowful about all the hurt and the loss and the suffering of this world – it is right in front of my face, all the time.

I am a forty-two year old adult. I am strong and I am mature. I have wisdom and intelligence, education and resources, freedom of movement and expression. I have life experience, conscience, discernment and the ability to exercise sound judgment. I can turn a T.V. off and on, I can change the channel, I can choose not to read magazines and newspapers or surf the net. I know how and when to filter, how to sort out good information from bad, and how to find out what I need to know. I have a deep, tested, abiding faith and the knowledge and words to comfort myself. And I, in this rich condition, find the pain of my world too much to process at the moment. There is too much to filter. There is so much that is needful and too much to hold in my brain.

If this is how I feel, how is a child supposed to process this world?

If there is one thing that I hate to hear people say, it is that children are resilient. No. No, they are not. We have to stop telling ourselves that. Children are not resilient – they are simply powerless to do anything to change their circumstances, and so they find ways to survive. Ask any messed up person that you know, and they will tell you about their crappy childhood – how their uncle molested them, how they had to shoot their own dog, how their parents wouldn’t stop fighting, what the words are that were spoken over them that they still hear in their heads. Children do not bounce back from trauma. When children are assaulted and abused in their bodies, minds and spirits, it affects them forever. When children are traumatized by events or images, it shapes them irrevocably. When children have their families torn apart, whether it is by death or divorce, it completely changes who they are. When children are exposed to things that a child should never be exposed to, it alters the pathways of their minds.

I was fourteen when my brother was hit by a train. A month after he died, a girl from our school was abducted and later found dead. The trauma, the grief and the fear infused into our community because of these two events was incredible – at least, I think so – I was not actually all there to fully experience it from a community perspective. I imagine that it took years to recover. Everyone within a hundred mile radius was hit with shrapnel. There was no space in between to get your bearings, make peace with it, find consolation, regain emotional strength. People had to choose who they were going to grieve for – where their resources were going to go. It was simply too much – an emotional Sophie’s Choice.

There were no glory days, but there are things that have changed even since then. Our community has gone global. We have a lot more neighbours to love than we used to. We are all starting to have to pick and choose between one horrific trauma and another – the wounded stranger on the side of the road has grown into a battle field. We have to choose. There are wounded everywhere we walk, and we simply cannot carry them all. We might love with all our hearts, we might even weep as we do it, but we have to step over them. We have to look away from them. We have to shut off, or we will crumple and fall and be one of them.

Sometimes I think that this is really the problem in our society right now – why so many people seem to be snapping – we cannot manage our emotions. We barely have time to acknowledge them, before we receive the next hit. We have been over-exposed, but we are still telling ourselves, Suck it up – Walk it off. Our emotions have been so continuously assaulted that we are all suffering from a massive case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. We’ve had to shut emotion and reasoning down, and we don’t know what to turn them back on for. We start to feel a morbid desire for the images and the details of the big stuff, because it signals us that we are alive – that we can still be horrified, that we can be moved with compassion, that we are not as numb as we fear.

On some level we know that we absolutely need to get up, because the water is getting very, very hot around us and we just can’t bring ourselves to really, really care. Not care enough to actually do something. We look around us and everyone else seems to be doing more or less ok soaking in the same hot water. We are completely desensitized. Maybe some of us are starting to look a little sleepy. Maybe some of us are starting to wiggle and bump and stack ourselves on top of the slow movers to keep ourselves off the bottom. Maybe some of us are already belly-up floaters – we look at them, perplexed, and try to figure out what happened.

And so I am wondering – what would it even look like, to hop out of the pot? Because, honestly – I am completely sincere and not being alarmist – I think it is time. I think we are boiling ourselves to death, and we are too numb to even know it.

I want to feel the pain. I do not want to pretend it is not there. Pain is what tells you that something is hurting you – pain is what makes you say, Stop. Enough. No more. Pain is what makes you get up and do something.

OVERCOMING EVIL

My heart is broken. I am so very sad, and so very angry, and so very at a loss. I so very badly want to find the words – string them together, wrap them around, bring understanding, bring healing. Those words do not exist. I am overwhelmed with feelings of disgust and grief and awe over the combination of events of this Friday. I hugged my children’s principal this morning – I wrapped my arms tight around her and I felt her heart, strong as a shield standing in front of my children. She loves my children. She would protect them. She would lose her life to protect them. I know that she would. There is something so staggeringly beautiful and sorrowful about that, I cannot do anything but weep over it. She is not a soldier; she is an Elementary School principal.

I cannot believe this is the world my children live in – where we collect assault rifles like stamps, where babies are targets, where we would consider giving guns to teachers and turning our schools into the O.K. Corral.

I cannot believe this is the world my children live in – where a mother would throw her much loved, much needed body over some other mother’s child to protect them, where women and children show such courage and nobility of spirit that I feel maybe I have seen the face of God.

What kind of a world is this that we are living in? Sometimes I think we have never been more magnificent and we have never been more insane.

There aren’t enough fingers on our hands to point at all the things to blame – guns, mental illness, sensationalist media, violent video games, broken families, absent fathers, a culture that celebrates violence and that rewards those who entertain us with it.

I believe this, with all my heart – we are all, under the right circumstances, capable of anything. With the right combination of factors, in a perfect storm, if the circumstances of our lives were different, we are all capable of anything. We are capable of murdering innocents, we are capable of becoming heroes, we are capable of saying, it’s too much to bear, it’s someone else’s child, turning our heads and putting it out of our minds.

We will never solve the problem of evil, or root out the source of the sickness that is in this world. It is inside of us.

But we have to decide, each of us for ourselves, how we are going to respond when we are confronted with it in others. What will we choose to do, when the most hideous evil imaginable touches us? Who will we choose to be when we are confronted with violence and pure insanity – when it breaks our heart, tortures our mind, lays our spirit low into the dust?

I do not believe that you can end violence with more violence. The most that you can hope to do with violence is to keep bodies alive. Violence cannot subdue or overcome the spirit, whether it is a spirit of violence or a spirit of heroism.

In my life, in my home, I have decided that the answer to pain, sorrow and injustice is to overcome evil with good. I have decided that life is sacred – sacred enough to sacrifice my life for – but that I do not love my own so much that I would take a life to preserve it. I give thanks for men and women who can, and do – who carry that burden in their jobs, to serve and to protect. I am not called to that. I need to honour them, to make their calling, their sacrifices and their courage meaningful, by using all the powers of life and freedom to overcome evil with good. To bury it alive. To drown it. To so completely overwhelm it, that the good that covers it is exponentially greater than the evil underneath it. I believe this.

We had a season in our lives where people kept stealing from us. We had bikes stolen, we had money stolen from ATM machines, we had wallets stolen out of desk drawers – over and over again, we felt the hurt of thievery. It was beyond discouraging. I started thinking a lot about how much people suck, and about how hard it is to work and work and work for something, and see somebody just come along, reach out their hand and take it. I started thinking about how much certain people needed to just get a job, and how I never wanted to give anything to anyone ever again.

The words came to me. Overcome evil with good. I decided that I would try. The next time somebody stole a bike from us, we bought another bike – and we bought a bike for somebody else who didn’t have one. In my heart I purposed that every time somebody stole from me, I would give to someone else in a greater measure, so that every single act of thievery would result in a greater giving that otherwise would not have happened. I would not just pay it forward – I would overcome it forward.

I have adopted this for my life. I make the choice that whatever injury is done to me, I will not respond with injury. I am choosing – I am trying very, very hard to choose – to respond with pouring out of myself the things that are the valorous and helpful and noble parts of my humanity. Courage. Compassion. Forgiveness. Sacrifice. Empathy. Service. Encouragement. Sharing. Redemptive grace. I will spend money to do this. I will give time to do this. I will break my own heart, if need be, to do this. I believe in this.

I am choosing to not self-preserve.  

I am choosing to believe that there are things more sacred than life, and that we sacrifice them to our own peril – to the peril of our children.

How do the mothers and fathers, the siblings or the children of the victims of Sandy Hook ever find a way to overcome evil with good? I do not know. I do not know. It is simply too great of an evil to overcome it alone. When you are broken and defeated, you just cannot.

Like hired mourners, we must do it with them and for them.

Let us dig down into ourselves to find the noblest parts of our humanity, to pull those things out of ourselves, and pour them all over our communities. Let us prove that the good that we are capable of is greater – far greater – than the evil that we are capable of.

I read that somebody was going to perform twenty-eight random acts of kindness in response to the twenty-eight deaths. I think this is beautiful. I think we need to find ways to perform acts of kindness that are not only random, but focused, purposeful, deliberate, pre-meditated, costly. Let us kindle our anger, and keep it kindled, so that we do not slide into resignation. Let us actively and purposefully move ourselves towards change.

As Ghandi lived and taught to us, We must be the change we want to see in the world. 

Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.  Romans 12:21