I was a Sunday school teacher for 30-plus years until recently, in a small liberal church in Northern California that rose out of the civil rights movement. I learned early on that when you have a lot of poor kids as students, you get to know tragedy up close — addicted or dead parents, shootings, the injuries and mortification of racism and poverty. So we talked more about tragedy than you might expect.
I never tried to comfort them with nice Christian bumper sayings or platitudes, especially after school shootings like the one at the back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. “Hey, kids. Yay! God’s got a plan! Phew.” Still, we did believe that death was a pretty major change of address and that God caught the children as they left this life.
But when we read in the Hebrew Bible that weeping may last the night and that joy comes in the morning, I explained that this does not mean literally at dawn, like a new bike from Walmart. We’re talking long dark nights of the soul. And the psalmist didn’t mean joy joy, like Pop Rocks and the Village People. He meant relief and peace, eventually.
There should be one inviolable rule: Children are not shot or starved to death.
Driving to church after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, I remembered a commentator saying that the measure of a nation is how many small coffins it allows. Of course, this explanation would not be useful to the younger ones in my class, two 9-year-old girls, or even to the teenagers, but it provided me with a hit of self-righteousness: We all know what the problem is. We allow people to own and use military-grade guns.
I always took my kids out to our small and slightly chaotic classroom midway through the adult service. They followed me like ducklings because they had been sprung and there would be snacks.
On that specific Sunday, I thought about going out of order and giving them their snacks first, before our discussion, to let them numb out a little on chips and sugar. There is so much evil and meanness coming from so many directions these days that we shut down and numb out on food, shopping, drinking, striving, whatever. After a few days, we forget to remember.
Instead, I started by asking them how they were doing in the face of the ghastly news out of Uvalde. They were pretty quiet. “OK,” one said. “Fine,” said another.
The rule of life is that the innocent suffer. Horrible people get away with horrible things. I asked them what their classroom teachers had them do the day after the shootings. A teenager mentioned shooter drills — “Run, hide, fight.”
This pierced me. I couldn’t stand seeing how helpless all of them felt. With so little to offer, I told them once again what Mr. Rogers’s mother told him: In the face of tragedy, look toward the helpers. That’s where we see goodness and sacrifice, and these give us hope. Let there be light, and let it begin with me.
I asked them who they thought they could most help, and without missing a beat, they mentioned the dead kids’ families, so my big kids got out the art supplies, and we started making cards with words of love, hope, glue and glitter (big mistake).
I didn’t tell them that good old Texas’ response was to propose teaching little kids how to stanch a classmate’s bleeding. Nor did I mention Fox News.
I mostly listened to them as they worked. I mostly listen to my peers, too, when they express the same helplessness and sense of doom. I remind them of what we can do — sing, sit in silence, light candles, take walks, make art. We register voters, pick up litter, overeat, sigh a lot, carry our pleas to our lawmakers: Please, please stop this. Only you can.
It is rough and harsh out there, and it seems, to my worried and paranoid self, worse by the day. We are a violent species in a currently violent nation. How do we take on these systems and structures of death?
We have to show up. We want to stay isolated from the suffering, but maybe the answer is to draw close — to the crying woman whose husband was deported to Manila, to the person whose son drove off a cliff, to the little ones who are practicing how to stay alive. You can cry with them, get them a glass of water, move their car if it is going to be towed, take a sandwich to the grandma who hasn’t eaten all day.
After one school shooting, my beloved rabbi friend Sydney Mintz told me a story from the Midrash (a collection of stories about what the Hebrew Bible teaches). When Moses smashed the original tablets with the Ten Commandments and stomped off back to Mount Sinai, someone swept up all the shards. They were eventually added to the ark alongside the replacement copy of the commandments.
We drag around our brokenness in the same container as our holiness.
Anger and murder have always been our lot and are going to keep happening. One of Adam and Eve’s sons killed another, and we still see this every day. It’s real, and all you can choose is how you’re going to react. Do you close yourself off, as if that will protect you, or do you try to stay open and get to work in the world?
The parents gathered around me that day to ask how they could talk to their kids about the shooting. Talk about love, I said, and listen. They asked: Was there meaning? No, not yet.
But, I suggested, perhaps it was a good day to make soup. When Syd feels most hopeless, she makes matzo ball soup for the sick and lonely and friends; in my Presbyterian tradition, we tend toward casseroles. These offer consolation to the soul. There are always a lot of people who need them, like me.
Meanwhile, their kids had escaped to the lawn, where they kicked around a mostly inflated soccer ball — some clumsy, some agile, sweaty, focused, radiant.
Anne Lamott is the author of “Somehow: Thoughts on Love,” “Bird by Bird,” “Some Assembly Required” and other books.
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