This weekend I was supposed to finally get to see Patty Griffin play live, right here in Austin, and on her birthday. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks.
Then on Friday, a mosque in New Zealand was targeted by a terrorist. I heard the news after my 8 am mass at school, the first one with my extracurricular choir of 2nd-5th graders, and was shook. My church in East Austin was contacted quickly and became the host for a vigil in fellowship with our Muslim communities here in my home. I saw the email on Friday night and thought, bummer, I’d have to miss it, I still want to see Patty. Saturday morning I woke up and started my regular teaching day, and partway through dancing around the green, sunlit studio with two three-year olds, I almost began weeping for no reason. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of the peace I was feeling in my body in that moment, compared to the torture my brain was undergoing anytime I let my brain wander off on its own and imagine how many fifty people was. Or which fifty people I might know who would be together in one place like that at any given time, peacefully. In that moment, a quiet voice said, no, dear one, not today. You have a job to do, and in your own spiritual home. You gotta be there.
Friends who do not go to St. James and who do not share my Christian faith had checked “attending” on the event page on Facebook. I checked in with myself and knew that either way, the evening for me would be spent weeping. On day one of the news, it was spent with people I love in quietness and with food and a thought-consuming baking project. By day two I was ready to let the processing begin.
It seems each time this happens it’s harder to read. It’s harder to listen to the news, it’s harder to interact with media of any kind. Something has been changing since I started working as a teacher, and I think it is good that I have become gentler, softer, more sensitive, maybe more aware of the suffering the people around me hold inside themselves. The suffering I keep inside of me. The ways we harm each other, both intentionally and unintentionally, with our words and our actions. It is so scarily easy to do harm. It is scarier though, to see young people who have grown up to commit acts of terror. As a teacher, this is the most frightening thought when faced with wanting to instill in my students a yearning for a safer, more kind and loving world.
As much as I can, I try to bring comfort and kindness to the suffering and pain in other people. It’s what I love about my role in my new school I started this year— I get to do this all day, sometimes 6 or 8 classes of students of all ages, and then I go home and I am very quiet and full and happy thinking about all of the myriad of moments and changes and growth I witnessed that day. And it feels as though good work has been done, and so far, I have been finding that I am able to tell myself each day, at a certain point, that it is enough. I have done enough, I can leave my work where it is, and come back tomorrow. And I get to rest.
Saturday night I got to the vigil early to be ready to do whatever folks needed, and after 25 minutes of tasks here and there, people began to arrive. In pairs and trios, families with young ones and adolescents, and I started to feel it all. I took a walk to the car after a while to get my handkerchief, and made a mental list of additional things to do. After the evening prayer in the parish hall, still more people were showing up, and I saw a mother with two tiny boys looking a little exasperated. I motioned to her boys, bent down, and asked them if they would like to sit up front, criss cross applesauce on the floor. Jim Harrington approved, so I started asking others, and went out to the narthex to see if more families wanted to come up closer.
The more children I spoke to, the more I was on the verge of losing it entirely, so eventually, I retreated back to calm down and stop looking beautiful humans in the face. It was too much.
It just seems to me that there is no reason to not love every human around you. It is so easy to love children, but in the space of bringing them to the front to be in the center of our gathering’s embrace, I looked at their mothers and fathers and saw their fear and trepidation too, and saw that they are beautiful as the children. Beautiful, and innocent, and beloved.
After that, I stood in the back a long time.
It was hard to listen to all of the people who stood to speak, one by one and sometimes in pairs. But I kept reminding myself that my offering was my presence and my attention, and that this was a space for everyone to feel as much and however as they needed to, and that I wanted to honor that.
Eventually the crowd thinned and I found my friends seated in their pew. The final speaker, a rabbi, asked us to stand. He started to sing a note, a hum or an Om, I’m not really sure, and he invited us to take his note, or to pick another note. The sound in the room swelled as hundreds of voices became brave together, and strong. And then the rabbi’s voice rang out clearly and vibrating over everyone else’s in a language I did not understand and a tonality that is foreign to my ears, and the cord holding my heart separate from my mind snapped, and I was burst open into all of the shuddering, shocking, emotion I had been holding in for 24 hours. Maybe 28 years. The burst was like a string popping after forgetting the guitar in a hot car and tuning the E string impatiently, and it reverberated through my whole body. The woman next to me, a stranger, responded by putting her whole self against me, and wrapping her arms around me, and I let myself sob. Breathing in and out and shuddering, stumbling, to let all of the stale and miserable and angry and exasperated out and to breath in this sound, this ancient, mysterious, yet present and alive warmth enter into me fully.
When I felt brave, I closed my eyes and breathed in deep, and began to sing.
I sang for New Zealand, and I sang for the people gathered in that space. I sang for friends I don’t talk to anymore, and family members who live far away. I sang for people I disagree with and who are difficult for me to love, and I sang for my three year old student with Leukemia. I sang for my friends standing right next to me also singing, and I even let myself sing for me.
I am very grateful for the small voice that said “Go to the vigil. Be a helper today.” I am very grateful for my Muslim friends, old and new since last night. I am grateful for love and community and connection. I am grateful for you.
