The tendrils and the strings

Post Reply New Topic

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt72823.html

As many of you may know, my church was Columbined last Sunday. A man driven by hatred of "the liberal movement" and turmoil in his personal life opened fire on the congregation during a children's production of the musical 'Annie', killing two and wounding seven.

I didn't go to the candlelight vigil on Monday night because I was stricken with a illness likely psychosomatic in origin, related to shock. I spent the week in hiding, reading H.P. Lovecraft and eating lots of weird food. I emerged to help my friend, who had lost his foster father (making him a double orphan--that's the most depressing thing ever), shop for funeral attire. There was a pallid numbness overlying all my time. My generation, which saw Columbine and 9-11 young, has succumbed to a certain these-things-happen compassion fatigue. The spirit of the books I have read begged me to force my way through the ennui and grieve like a human should, but I had no idea how to do that. My emotions were very gray.

The rededication of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church took place this morning, and I went, without having slept the night before and without knowing what the service would consist of. My father scampered off with the rest of the press people while I loitered awkwardly in the high-schooler's Sunday school room (unitarians take Sunday school as far as it can go). After a few minutes alone with Dostoevsky, the room became populated with people my age who were waiting to be called to the sanctuary for our part of the service. We turned on the television and watched the news coverage of the event. Live TV cameras watched the building I was sitting in, and smooth-haired creatures talked with practiced poignancy of the outpouring of sympathy from all churches, synagogues, and mosques in the Knoxville area. Five police officers, more symbols of safety than necessary guards, watched the grounds.

The Story For All Ages began with the sound of the chime, and a small, perky woman led us to the front of the crowded sanctuary. We sat down. The salt-and-pepper-haired youth minister had us sit on the floor. Everyone under eighteen was to receive a "bravery award" for healing and five paper cranes for peace. I didn't want to take my bravery award because I felt like an illegitimate survivor, for I had not been present at the actual shooting. But when the youth minister handed me mine, I could not reject it. I was beholden to the church.

Instead of a children's story we heard speeches. The first was an impassioned one by an elder authority. He began his speech by quoting Elie Wiesel on the definition of sanctuary.

The name Elie Wiesel made me melt. Those who have followed my writings here may be aware that I had an epiphanatic experience while reading his famed little Holocaust book Night about two years ago, a climactic realization that led me to teach myself empathy, that Mount Everest of autistic people. I read that book, trembling, wondering what was wrong with me because I kept wanting to go back in time and give this unfortunate child a hug after his long days of working for the Nazis. Then, as I read of him waking up one cold morning in Buchenwald to find his ailing father missing and presumed dead, I realized that I was sad because I cared. And that I was supposed to be sad about it all. Then, empathy. Like stardust.

But I digress. Elie Wiesel wisely defines sanctuary as a brief and unpretentious moment of respite in the worst of times. A senseless act of beauty in a pit of horrendous human ugliness. Our speaker, with tears on his cheeks, urged us all to keep courage in our hearts and offer true sanctuary to our fellows. This was when I began to weep.

I remember only two other speakers well. One was a comic relief, an inspiration. He opened by saying that the shooter was convinced that liberals were too soft on crime and terror, and that he had had a rather rude awakening last Sunday. This was a reference to how the "limp-wristed pansy liberal unitarians" had tackled him and wrestled him to the ground before he could fire a second round of shots. Not exactly soft on crime. Laughter and applause. He then launched into a rousing sermon on the ironic and beautiful unity the shooting, intended to be divisive, created in the community. He also recalled TVUUC in its early days, when the administration would organize integrated day-camps where the multi-colored children of the fifties could play together for once. The unitarians had to quite literally fight off the Klan then. When they became Tennessee's first openly gay-friendly church in the seventies, they were picketed and their building was horribly vandalized. The message was that unitarians do not and should not back down when jeered or even shot at.

The other speaker was a woman, obviously into eastern philosophy, who asked us to close our eyes, breathe, and try to love everything on earth. It was the sort of thing that would be cheesy in any other situation, but that was profound then and there. After some serious deep breathing, my mind cleared and I had a beautiful hallucination. I opened my wet eyes and saw my chest sprouting dozens of pinkish-red tendrils and strings of unsurpassed delicacy, which bloomed out and connected to the chests of everyone in the church. The others broke with strings, too, and soon we were all floating in a heart-level sea of pinkish-red light. And above me, I could hear the woman telling me to breathe and to love. Dostoevsky said that hell is the unhappiness of being unable to love. I didn't have enough pink rope to connect me to everyone in the world, but I had enough for the congregation and the visitors. And that made me dizzyingly happy.

Of course the vision was gone in an instant. No one can maintain such states for long. I cried. I had difficulty keeping quiet for the benefit of others. Someone covertly passed a pack of tissues my way. At first I was embarrassed, but then I remembered that I was experiencing human emotion, just like everyone else in the room. There was nothing to be embarrassed about.

We sung a few hymns, one about the circle of song and one about how God is male, female, young, and old at once. At the very end of the service, the cast of that production of 'Annie' took the stage and sung 'Tomorrow,' a Broadway tune that took on immeasurable significance in the given context. I ran up and hugged my friend, the same one mentioned in the first paragraph, Little Orphan Taylor. I loved him absolutely in that moment. On my way out of the sanctuary, I told the WBIR channel 10 cameraman, who I had never seen before, that I loved him.

I wish I could wrap up this story with the same narrative perfection as the service it describes, but I do not know what to think of the events of today. I am in a muddle, so I have no choice but to leave you in one, too. It was a mysterious event, the explosion of the pinkish-red strings. I want to say that it was my fevered brain in desperate need to convey to me the gravity of what I was trying to express, but finding the words "fellow-feeling" and "sympathy" and "love" insufficient. So my brain went Carl Jung on me and brought me a great archetypal image instead of a word. And I do mean GREAT.

What of these explosions of grief and love? My intellect cannot fathom them. They lie outside its understanding.

That's too bad. I just read about it at richarddawkins.net.

Oh, my, goodness.

I wonder what Richard Dawkins would have to say about all this?

The shooting or what? The shooting was embarrassing to organized religion, certainly. The unitarian church is a very disorganized religion, the kind that Dawkins might be able to stomach, and that seems to make people feel very threatened.

As for my vision, I don't know if I was experiencing God or experiencing humanity.