"Let nothing disturb you; let nothing frighten you. All things are passing..."
Years ago, and years after my brother's death, Michael and I were strolling through the Riverwalk Shopping Mall at the edge of the French Quarter on a leisurely Sunday afternoon. We had just gotten off the escalator upstairs when two shots rang out, and there was a flurry of panic, then a chilling silence. Very quickly word spread that a man had killed a cashier, then himself, in a small shop across the corridor from where we stood. I remember looking into the store, and seeing two feet under a clothes rack, as if someone were lying down to check out the merchandise. After the initial shock had subsided, Michael was ready to move on, but I couldn't leave just yet. It had all happened too quickly, and there was the absurd thought that if we could just slow time, if we could just stop for a second, we could hold sacred space for what we had witnessed, and somehow understand.
It was the same sense I had as I stared at the floor, the brown tweed hotel carpet which will always be in my memory, as I listened to my sister telling me over the phone about the death of our brother. I had the awareness, even as I was doing it, that I was memorizing the swirls in the bedspread, the pattern of the carpet, the mind frantically searching for some grounding as life was suddenly being turned upside-down. The pause button of life is pressed in those moments, while our minds attempt to comprehend what our hearts won't allow. Eventually, of course, the moments quicken and life resumes, though changed forever.
Yesterday afternoon we sat in a picture perfect setting by the water, reading our respective books, looking up to casually comment on a particular boat or watch the small planes flying in for the air show this weekend. The sky was its bluest and the temperature the blissful comfort of sunshine's warmth and slightly cooling sea breezes.
I don't know why I stood and turned towards the eagle nest, but as I did, she shot out like an arrow towards the distant shore of low tide. "She's after something," I told Michael, who watched with me as her mate came in from the left. There was a flutter of wings in the flock of Canada Geese out on the water, and Michael thought she had a large fish. I felt a withering inside as I said, "It's too large for a fish," and somehow I knew before he spoke. He grabbed the binoculars and said, "She has a baby goose." Everything in me cringed with aversion and horror as she struggled with her heavy load. It was finally too much for her, and she settled down on the beach directly in front of us, talons firmly grasping her prey, and waited for the writhing to stop, before carrying food up to her eaglet.
We have cellular memory, researchers and scientists tell us; trauma that we have experienced are deeply imbedded in the cells of our bodies. Events will trigger those memories, and we will experience not only the particular happening of the moment, but the body of shock that has accumulated throughout our lives. News of sudden death, shots ringing out in shopping centers, terminal diagnoses, the seeming violence of nature, the daily droning of crises and looming threats. Darkness and light are present in all of our days, each with its purpose, and each with its effect on our minds, our bodies, our hearts. Through the darkness we grow, and we learn eventually to call on the strength of the moments we have spent in the Light.
"Who forms light and creates darkness, Who makes peace and Who creates evil? I am God. I do all these things." (Is 45:7) In the brutal honesty of the flow in the world around us, we experience light and darkness; we see tranquility, and what we perceive as shock and horror. Long after he has given his life so that life itself can be sustained, I still see the gosling's feathers flying, hear the weak bleating of the mother goose who could not defend her young against the onslaught of two eagles, and I relive the quick and stunning shift in our afternoon outing. Life and nature have resumed their rhythm, while I am left reliving the moment.
I want to erase this somehow, and realize that what I really want to do is erase all of those moments of shock, of grief, of brown tweed carpets in hotels where horror has announced itself and changed forever our lives. I want life to rewind itself, to see the eagle drop the gosling back into her family and, after all these years, to have life drop my brother back into his.
"It's nature," my neighbor says. There is nothing evil about this; no premeditation, no waste of life, as if life could ever be wasted. It is not so much the act itself, but the memories it evokes of struggle, of trauma, of the swift shift in a life that is, quite literally, a gift in every moment. And there is balance. The geese move on. The eaglet squeals in delight as her sustenance is delivered, and the continuum that is the perfection of nature is maintained. Death makes possible new life. Trauma and shock release our complacency into a heightened awareness of the fragile joy offered each moment.
Tagore speaks of a joy that "sets the twin brothers, life and death, dancing over the wide world." In each occurrence, we are peeling back layers of God, and revealing mystery in the soul, the mystery that will, like this shoreline now exposed, once again be hidden by a surging tide of grace. "All things are passing. God alone is changeless." We bow. We give thanks. We praise. What else can we do?
YAY GOD
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