Hard Lessons

When something like the Boston bombings happens, the sentiment tends to be fairly universal: “Whoever did this does not understand who we are. They tried to destroy us, but they will only make us stronger.”

I am sorry to say this – I know it will not go over well with everyone – but that sentiment, while lovely, proves we don’t yet have an understanding of terrorism.

They don’t care about “who we are.” All they care about is how many people they kill.

That’s their entire goal. Kill people. That is what it means for them to “win.” We can be as determined as we want to be, as poetic as we can rise to be. We can write words and sing songs and organize charities and talk about how we’re Americans and how the virtue of our birthplace makes us better than the rest of the world at this recovery.

They don’t care about any of that.

Most of the time, they have principles they’re fighting for. Most of the time, they have a political disagreement. Nothing more. Sure, it may manifest itself in theology, in whatever twisted perspective they might have on what God wants them to do. But it’s usually for political reasons. A hatred of Zionism or an anger over federal bankrolls.

We don’t know, of course, the motive for Boston’s bombing. But I’m pretty sure it was not because someone wanted to take down the spirit of America. Whether we like it or not, it could have just been a stupid, pimple-faced teenager who wanted to do something horrible. We jump to all these conclusions. We assume it’s some major terrorist network. And maybe it was. But maybe it wasn’t. We assume this is someone really smart. Well, it could have just been someone who knew when the last security sweep happened and when they could walk through with a backpack and drop it somewhere. They might claim to be part of a major terrorist network. The people who run it will never have heard of the bomber or bombers, but they may welcome the claim because they can add it to their success rate. And the bottom line is, it doesn’t really matter.

It happened because somebody wanted to kill people.

Mission accomplished.  And that’s all that matters.

When President Bush repeatedly told the nation and the world after 9/11 that the attack happened “because they hate our freedom,” he was oversimplifying the situation by a huge factor. This isn’t the only free country, and it didn’t happen anywhere else. He was doing it for a benevolent reason: to inspire unity. But he wasn’t telling the American people the truth. The truth would require us to have access to secret information. The truth doesn’t fit in a soundbite. It’s complicated and convoluted and it bores people. That’s not his fault. We don’t really care enough to know the real truth. That would require us to pay a lot more attention to the world and the way nations are run. We can barely get our own electorate to vote.

Some attacks are designed to be spectacular, to inspire fear. In those cases, yes, it might be helpful to our cause not to show that fear. But that doesn’t mean they’ll stop trying to kill people. They aren’t thwarted by waving flags and Red Cross donations. They are thwarted by tactical prevention borne of political will. If one person decides to stop trying, another person takes his place. It’s like flowers in the barrels of guns. It’s a beautiful thought and a stirring image. But the flower won’t stop the bullet. All it takes is someone willing to pull the trigger.

Terrorists don’t care about prison. They don’t care about torture. They don’t care about execution. None of those possibilities dissuade them. They obviously have no value for life, be it someone else’s or their own, because they’re willing to do something heinous and, if necessary, go down for it. That’s why they’re so hard to stop. And even if they get caught and they’d rather not die later, they didn’t care when they did it. So what does it matter now?

It’s a difficult thing to know. It makes us feel powerless all over again, and that is a deeply troubling feeling when we who value life and humanity just need some way to ensure its survival. But it is fundamental to understanding how to fight back. The real reason for our sentiment, beyond a profound misunderstanding of the way terrorism works, is that it’s the only way we ordinary people have to fight back. We can’t do anything but ache for the people who have been hurt or the families of those who have died. We are powerless, and so we find some strength in believing ourselves to be better and in finding something we can do for the victims.

And we absolutely should do that. That is what confirms our humanity. We should never stop doing that. That is what is right for average Americans to do.

But fighting terrorism with spirit? That’s a losing effort every time.

A Tender Spring

Today is my birthday.

It’s also the anniversary of the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007. 

This week marks the anniversaries of Waco, Columbine and Oklahoma City, all of which I very clearly remember watching unfold.

And now Boston.

Since 2007 in particular, I have deliberately avoided media on my birthday. I don’t want to spend it filled with teary reminders of tragedy and horror and ways the world will never be the same. I don’t want to corrupt the light and airy joy of a newfound spring with the weight and sorrow of manmade hells. I spend every day immersed in the world’s troubles; I want one day’s rest, and I have demanded that it be April 16th since the day six years ago when 32 college students died. 

But it seems the universe refuses to comply with that demand. It seems this day is not just about me. From the moment I logged into Facebook to read well wishes from friends, I was barraged with images from Boston and Virginia Tech. I cannot avoid the world and its troubles today.

When I saw the horror begin in Boston, I desperately wanted it to have been a terrible accident. I wanted it to have been a couple of propane tanks, or a gas line… something unintended. Somehow that would have taken so much of the pain out of the injuries, so much of the heartbreak out of the deaths. But as I kept close watch over the developments, it felt more and more like what it was. And I felt less and less like someone who has any say at all in how life unfolds.

I thought of Jack. I have a ridiculous number of marathon-running friends, and I knew Jack wasn’t in Boston yesterday; he ran it in 2002 and he never runs the same marathon twice. But I knew he and my other runner friends would be wrenched by what had happened. I checked to make sure none of them were at the race; they weren’t. I thought about the two marathons I went to with Jack, the one where we spent three hours in the medical tent after he crossed the finish line because what started out as stubbornly tight calves turned into debilitating dehydration-related cramps that signaled the danger of a heart attack. I thought about what it might have been like as he lay dazed, pained, shaking and high on valium, if a sudden stream of terribly bloodied and limbless runners arrived. And kept arriving. And just kept arriving.

Though I have cut off contact with Jack, I did access the one thing I know is available in case I wonder if he’s alive: his Twitter account for work. He had posted a link to a blog post he had written on his company’s website – something he does from time to time. Jack is a beautiful writer, and before I knew it, I was reading what he had written. 

I wondered last night if I could put together a blog post on Boston, and pretty quickly dismissed it. One of the saddest things about it is that there seems to be nothing left to say. There have been too many Bostons. I have used up all my words.

There are already many images of Boston that I can instantly recall without aid of internet or television. But I’m grateful for the one that I seem to see most often in my mind. It is the image of people running into the blast zone, seconds after the explosions erupted, to help whoever was hurt. Not all of them were emergency workers. Not all of them were event staff. Some of them were just runners, runners’ friends or fans, Bostonians in the area for what the city commonly calls The Best Day.

No matter how much the darkness seeks to shroud April, human nature tends toward the sun. 

On my birthday, perhaps I am blessed to be reminded that, in the wake of too many tragedies, there have been so many glimmers of light.

The sun is coming through the clouds now. And I am going to go for a walk in the park, to see the new buds on the trees, the daffodils in bloom, the children at play.

To greet the tender spring.

 

Aurora

I don’t have to write many words to describe the thoughts we’ve probably all had about what happened in Aurora, Colorado just after midnight Friday morning. The only word I have to write is “Why?”

But whomever may answer that question one day will need many, many more words. Any belief to the contrary serves no purpose except to dismiss the horror and find comfort in that dismissal, if nowhere else.

We have likely all imagined – whether it was for a moment or for hours, once or several times over the last few days – what it must have been like to be in that movie theater. To be disoriented by the booming sound of the movie mixed with the booming sound of the gunfire. To be stunned and scared and spurred on to act. To be frozen. To be wounded. To lay dying, with the surreal images of a comic superhero looming large somewhere nearby, casting the only light into what has become an unfathomable kind of darkness.

We have likely all imagined what it must have been like for the families of the people in that theater when they learned about what had happened, when they got a call that one of their sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers had been shot. When they sat beside the hospital bed trying to make a doctor’s words into some sort of syntax they could understand.

We may have even imagined what it was like for the police, the SWAT team, the paramedics to show up at a scene so chaotic and unexpected that it’s a miracle they managed to react as well as they did.

Did we imagine what it was like for the gunman?

No one wants to do that. No one wants to put themselves in the shoes of someone who would carry out carnage so horrific, so brazen, so indescribably savage and callous and wrong.

No one wants to think that it could ever, ever be them.

A year ago… ten years ago… twenty… do you think James Holmes thought it could be him?

Nothing I say in this post is meant to excuse or absolve his actions (and herein, I assume his guilt). I do not believe that is possible. Nor do I intend any moral relativism. I want that to be clear. It’s not that I don’t think he’s guilty. It’s not that I don’t think he deserves to be locked up somewhere. It’s that I think he is unwell, and there is good reason the unwell should not be regarded as anything less than human.

At this point, there is much we do not know about what happened in Aurora. We know even less – almost nothing at all – about what was happening in Holmes’ mind. It is tempting to think him a monster, a cold, cruel, heartless, evil being devoid of humanity or courage. Those whose lives have been forever altered by his actions have every right to feel that way about him.

But it doesn’t mean it’s true.

Once, he was a child. Once, he was a college student. Once, he was a son.

This is not the writing of a bleeding heart, but of a broken one. Because it is in our trashing of humanity that we show our inhumanity, and that works in more than one way. The calculated killings of 12 and woundings of 58, the careful traps and triggers laid out in Holmes’ apartment, are not the only symptoms of a disregard for life that will come of this tragedy.

Because there will be many of us who will dismiss him as a demon. A misfit. A coward. A rogue. A psycho. And never again think about his humanness.

Because it’s so, so much easier that way, and isn’t this hard enough as it is?

As a nation, every time a mass murder happens, we talk for days about what’s wrong with the country. What’s wrong with its young people, what’s wrong with society, what’s wrong with the laws. And then we do almost nothing. We put up crosses and teddy bears and floating balloons and we light candles and we leave the victims and their families to deal with the hole in their lives and the vacuum it’s created in their sense of what’s ordered in the world. And then it happens again. And again.

And again.

We could talk about gun laws, and I personally believe there is good reason to talk about that, because I believe they’re insufficient and I believe that any logical 2nd amendment protector could agree that no one needs assault weapons and no one needs six thousand rounds of ammunition, much less someone who’s never owned a firearm or been hunting before. We could talk about violent video games and violent movies and a lack of discipline from parents and from teachers. We could talk about drugs. We could talk about a thousand things.

What we should also talk about is the nature of mental illness and personality disorders, and how to deal with them.

But when that subject comes up, suddenly, we all get very, very quiet.

Again: we do not know what went on in James Holmes’ head. And it’s understandable that some of us can’t abide the implied degree of forgiveness that comes with acknowledging an issue of mental health. But today I saw the full video of Holmes’ hearing, and though I’m not an expert, my sister is well-trained, and she thinks the same thing I think: this is a man who is mentally ill or has a personality disorder.

My sister is a licensed clinical social worker with years of experience treating the criminally insane. She worked with men who were locked up not in a prison, but in a criminal forensic psychiatric facility, because their crimes, though grave, were spurred by mental illness or personality disorder. One of the most important reasons that people with these conditions should be in a psychiatric facility instead of a prison is that, if their condition is not treated, they will likely become more dangerous even to other inmates or correctional officers, and more dangerous to society if their crime did not carry a life sentence.

There are those who would argue that someone who’s crazy couldn’t have plotted out their attack so carefully as Holmes appears to have done. That’s not true. Psychosis of some kind – schizophrenia, for example – can drive an unwell person’s judgments and actions for as long as it lasts. It is entirely possible that psychosis dictated Holmes’ months of calculation, including ordering his ammunition and chemicals, and buying his weapons.

There are those who would argue that if he were truly that disordered, there would have been some sign, but so far we know of none. Also not necessarily true. Holmes happens to be at the right age for what clinicians call an initial psychotic break. It is possible that the break began, and thus his plot began. There are numerous cases of vicious crimes – though few as vicious as this – committed by someone in their early 20s with absolutely no criminal or psychological history prior to the crime. My sister alone has treated several such criminals. She treated someone who was undergoing electroconvulsive therapy – ECT or shock therapy as it’s commonly known – and saw him slowly begin to realize just how disordered he was. She was a witness to his horror at who he had become.

Holmes fits a psychotic profile in another way: he was a graduate student in neuroscience who recently faced what the University of Colorado called an “intense” oral exam. Significant stress can trigger a psychotic break in a person in their early 20s who has never shown signs of mental illness before.

It also wouldn’t be surprising if Holmes says he doesn’t remember what he did. When we do something traumatic to this degree, the brain shuts down the memory-making or memory-retrieval system. It does so to protect us, so we don’t have to live with what we’ve done. It’s simliar to blocking out bad memories of something that happened to us in childhood. It’s inconsistent, but again, my sister worked with someone who had forgotten part of what he’d done. He wanted to see surveillance video because he couldn’t remember a specific part of his crime. (She didn’t allow it – she knew it might have fulfilled a fantasy for him.)

When we forget, or refuse to acknowledge, these very real things about the nature of the human mind and disorders, we ignore part of our humanity. When we dismiss someone as a nut or a monster, we remove their humanity. That is what allows crimes like these to continue. When we ignore the reality of mental disorder, we ignore what causes mass murder. Just as a criminal may disregard humanity in favor of killing, so too do we disgregard humanity in favor of a simpler, more satisfying, less painful answer to a deeply disturbing question: how could a human do such terrible things to other humans?

The answer, however complex, however dark, however impossible it is to put into words, lies in all of us.

Just like it lies in James Holmes.

My Father’s Daughter

My father was nearly 26 when I was born. The first of four daughters, I would train him in what it meant to be a dad. I was the guinea pig. And I quickly showed my parents that they would have little to no control over what their darling little girls would be.

My mother will tell you that when I was about two and still (for a few months) the only child, she was rather surprised to realize that her children would not be little malleable personalities that she could mold into whatever she wanted them to be. They would be who they were, and she might not be able to do much about it.

My father puts it differently. “You’ve been independent since you were two damned years old,” he tells me. But there’s always a twinkle in his eye when he says it.

My dad is big: six feet four inches, and every ounce of 240 pounds. He could scare you as soon as look at you, and my sisters and I joke about the look we would get if we didn’t have our best table manners on display at dinner. My father inherited The Look from his father, who was not big at all. The Look is well understood in my extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins. Many of us have inherited it, including me. I don’t have any children to give it to, but I’ve been known to give it to coworkers and friends. But I still hate getting it from Dad. Takes me right back to being eight years old.

My father never went to college, a choice he has regretted for decades. But I thought he was the smartest man in the world, and sometimes I still do. He has a natural curiosity, a passion for “getting it,” and a knack for quickly processing things. He might not have book knowledge, analyses of literature or philosophy, but there’s never a conversation between us in which he can’t hold his own. We talk about a lot of things: business, politics, current events, family history, present drama. We can talk for an hour and a half.

He’s stubborn and difficult sometimes, but when it comes to academic things, he’s never afraid to say, “Hey, I don’t know this. What do you know?”

When I was a little girl, there was nothing he couldn’t answer for me (unless he chose the answer “Go ask your mother”).  When I was out of the house and my little sister was in fourth grade, I called one night and Dad was studying with her for a test. This was something he had never done with us older girls; he’d always been working.

On the phone, Dad seemed aggravated, and I could hear my little sister laughing in the background.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Your sister has a test tomorrow and I’m trying to study with her–” (cackles from what sounded like a place lower than where he was standing… was she on the kitchen floor?)      ”–but she won’t focus!”

“Where is she?”

“Oh, she’s on the floor,” he replied with a mock-casual tone, clearly irritated with my sister’s youthful giddiness.

“Let me talk to her.”

“Hello?” she giggled.

“Hey shorty. I hear you laughing and Dad seems annoyed.”

A sigh. “I have a test tomorrow in social studies. It’s about fields and streams and exploring and settlements and stuff, but Daddy keeps going on and on about maps.”

“You should know it!” Dad yelled from somewhere sounding like the family room.

“Dad! That was last week!” my sister yelled back.

Aha. “Put him back on the phone,” I told her.

“She’s impossible!” he huffed. “She studied this last week! She should understand how it goes together with this week’s lessons!” Not only had Dad not studied with his older daughters; he’d lost what little patience he had as he’d gotten older.

“Dad, kids don’t learn like that.”

“She just did it last week!”

“I know, Dad, but she’s young. They don’t care about last week. They care about this week. It doesn’t all come together until later.”

He sort of growled. My sister laughed again in the background. 

“She’s killin’ me,” he said. But there was laughter in his voice.

My mother and I don’t have a close relationship. My independence and self-possessed nature– my non-malleability– was never something she could get her head around. Many times between  my 18th and 25th birthdays, my father would call me and start his first sentence with, “Your mother…”

Any time my father started a sentence with “your mother,” I knew he was running interference for her. He wanted to smooth the way and get me to understand and respect something from her perspective. He also wanted me to call her and make whatever was going on go away, even if she was in the wrong.  Yet as I have gotten older, he’s also called me and asked me to explain certain things about my mother to him.

“I give up. What the hell is wrong with your mother?” he’ll say.

My father is a pretty stoic guy. Being as big as he is, and as Irish as he is, it’s almost a requirement. He can be gruff and abrupt. He can bark. His whole expression can change in a second from something relaxed to something that looks like it’s going to shoot lasers out of its eyes. One of his friends and former employees used to call him The Man of A Thousand Faces.

I have inherited this trait, as well. I make lots of faces that get me into trouble. But incongruously, I don’t show much emotion. Very few people have ever seen me cry. I’m sensitive, but no one sees that. ”She’s a rock,” people say.

Guess who I got that from.

This leads me to be able to understand my father a little better, perhaps, than most people do. Maybe even better than my sisters. When he lost his job to “corporate downsizing” nine years ago, I happened to be home for a visit. He told all of us how everything was fine and my sister’s upcoming wedding was already paid for and he would find another job. But I knew, as the oldest daughter, the one who had inherited his stubbornness and stoicism mixed with tenderness and sensitivity, the first one to inherit his work ethic and sense of self, that it was killing him. He was 51 at the time. He had moved his family from city to city and state to state for that job, finally working his way back to where we were from,  finally “home,” back with family and old friends, where he’d meant to retire. He had no degree and no experience outside of what he’d been doing (on call 24 hours a day) for 28 years. I knew he was worried about getting another job. When I heard him on the phone, telling his parents that the way he’d supported his family for decades was disappearing, I died for him.

His friends and former co-workers created a position for him in a rival company. He took a major pay cut, but he had a job. He worked for two years in that position until the company told him they had a job for him in Florida. His choice was to take that job and move just as he and my mother had planned to settle in where they’d been raised and be around for their aging parents… or lose his job again.

They moved. Twenty-four hours later, they were called home because my grandfather was dying.

Everything that was stewing in my father got very powerful, very quickly. It built into a head of steam that led to a confrontation a few nights later with one of my older cousins over something stupid that nearly led to a fistfight.

We have never spoken of that night, as my grandfather lay dying in his bed in the house and the rest of the family sat in the backyard, digesting a cookout.

It was Father’s Day, 2004.

My dad thought he would lose his father that night, and have to leave his siblings to care for his unwell mother, after he had lost his job, and his whole plan for being there as his parents aged and his children had children.

What he showed was anger. What he had was guilt, and a broken heart.

Later, he called my cousin out from the house. I heard it. He used his eldest nephew’s  nickname - the one that only my father (and I) call him. And I knew everything was going to be alright. Dad had realized how wrong he was. I’m sure he was ashamed, and he has a lot of Irish pride, but I know he apologized. He recognized the man his nephew had become, and he had confronted within himself what had really caused that time-stopping standoff in the yard.

As Dad has gotten older, he’s acknowledged that the next generation has gotten older, too. He realizes that his daughters are women now, and that they each deserve respect for what they’ve accomplished, what they know, and who they are. He treats us as the women we’ve become instead of the little girls we used to be.

Most of the time, at least.

He is never happier than when he has all four of his girls together. He admires his daughters. Which makes me love him even more.

As it turns out, my father did have some control over who I would become. I got my college education, in large part, because he did not. He is not perfect, and having inherited much of my personality from him, neither am I. I have his wit. I have his work ethic. I have his bad back and his dirty looks. I have his curiosity and his impatience. I have his stubborn pride and his tender heart. And I could not be prouder, or more grateful, to be his daughter.

God is not a carcinogen. Now what?

A word of warning: this is some intense stuff. 

There are things one is not to discuss in polite company. Tea partiers. Salaries and costs of homes. Personal sexual escapades. And thoughts like, “What the hell is God doing, anyway?”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Probably for about four years, if I’m really honest. I am Catholic, and I have no interest in leaving the Church. I’m not the best Catholic, and I’m not the worst. I don’t endorse some of the things the Church has gotten into, and I’m just absolutely disgusted and infuriated by other things, but my faith is a Catholic faith, and my method of worship is a Catholic method of worship, and so there I stay. But for the last few years, I’ve had what more Godly people would call a crisis of faith. Alright, maybe a mini-crisis.

This will not come as good news to the parents of my godsons, by the way.

It started with my grandmother’s death. No, not her death. Her dying. It was the first time I ever really got angry with God, a concept that I previously could not even fathom. But my grandmother had been sick for 17 years. She had devoted her life to God and serving Him. There was evidence of this throughout the house. Not the clutter of ostentatiously pious bric-a-brac, but some serious signs of ecumenical and sacrificial dedication. All of her children went to Catholic schools. She held some fundraisers and organized others for the parish. She helped put together plans for major Church events. She sang in the church choir. Articles were written. Honors were presented. When I called to tell her, on Easter 2000, that my mother’s mother had passed away, the first words out of her mouth were an awed, “Praise be to God.”

I didn’t blame God for Grandmom’s Parkison’s Disease. I don’t believe God causes bad things to happen. I get a little frustrated with people who say someone’s death, particularly an untimely one, was God’s plan, or that God wouldn’t give them anything that they can’t handle. I don’t believe that God plans for a teenager to be shot to death in the middle of a street. I don’t believe that God would “take” a life willfully, would steal a child from his mother and condemn her to a lifetime of unimaginable heartache. I’m not even convinced there is a “plan.” My way of summing this up is to say, “God is not a carcinogen. God gives us life. Life gives us cancer.” I truly do believe that.

But in July of 2007, my grandmother developed pneumonia. I was in France when she was hospitalized, but I had a horrible feeling something was wrong at home, and as I stood in the gift shop at Sacre Coeur, staring at rosaries, a voice in my head kept saying, “Grandmom. Grandmom.” I found out when I got through customs back in the States that she was quite ill, and the family had thought we might lose her while I was away. When I arrived at the hospital, straight from the airport, she seemed relieved to see me. She had thought she might not. And as I kissed her goodbye at the end of the visit, I admonished her not to say such things.

She nodded once and winked at me. “Right,” she whispered, unsmiling.

Of course, we both knew she was dying. Pneumonia is what most often claims the lives of Parkinson’s patients. She went home, but for a month, she slowly deteriorated. Then she took a turn, and I sat by her bedside at home as she slept something like 20 hours one day. Late in the night, just before I went to pick up my father from the airport and bring him to her, she woke up, held my hand, and asked me to sing “Ave Maria” to her, right there and then. She told me not to forget that I was to sing it at the funeral.

The next day, she had more energy, and she was awake most of the time. With my father back from Florida and her family assembled, it seemed all the pieces were in place. “I wonder what we’re waiting for,” she said to me.

I remember praying that God would have mercy and take her peacefully, that He would be mindful of all she had given to Him, of how she had literally and figuratively sung His praises all her life, of how she and my late grandfather had raised their family to be faithful.

But dying, it became increasingly clear, is a thing one does alone.

“Are You even listening?!” I finally screamed at Him in my head. “Are You paying attention?! Do You even care?!”

It was another week before she passed. I had had to go home, and go back to work. My father called at 6:20am from the airport in Florida, where he had been bound back north after he, too, had had to return to work. I never cried for Grandmom. I was only relieved that her suffering was over, and I believed she had been reunited with my grandfather and her parents. I was at peace with her death. I helped plan her funeral Mass, and I sang the “Ave Maria.”

But I was pissed at God. He didn’t help her. He let her suffer. After 17 years of a degenerative, humiliating, painful disease, He let her actual dying take a month. Her body was exhausted and aching, her lungs were damaged, her soul was crying for Him. But He let her die on her own.

And I started to realize the many things for which I had faithfully prayed that were never granted.

There’s a sweet saying about being grateful for unanswered prayers. There’s a parable about footprints in the sand. They are nice thoughts. I suppose they are a comfort for those who find themselves praying all the time for something that never happens. Not material things, not trivial things. Real, important things. It used to comfort me to think of the gifts of an unanswered prayer, until I realized how many of them there have been.

There are tragedies large and small literally all day long. Some of them you know about. Others you don’t. Sometimes the details of someone’s personal pain are so horrid that it’s just not necessary to impart them on the world. And then sometimes, there are catastrophic global events. 9/11. Katrina. Indonesia. Haiti. Japan. There are photos and videos of unrelenting waves marching through and obliterating towns and lives. Of cracks opening up in the earth and swallowing people up. Of buildings crumbled into piles on top of entire families. Of cars swept out to a sea that was once a mile away. Of a man clinging to his rooftop, spotted by helicopter crews, ten miles from a new kind of nowhere, nearly insane with worry about what had happened to his wife.

Eli, Eli, lema sabbachtani?

People say everything happens for a reason. I used to believe that, but I don’t anymore. I can’t see the reason for things like the human nightmare of massive earthquakes and tsunamis. Sometimes things just happen and they’re horrible and there’s no reason for it at all. But I believe we can find good, that we can force good to come out of those horrors. And I do think life is sometimes a mercurial thing, with connections we could never fathom. I have said that if 20 pints of blood donated for one sick loved one couldn’t save them, but a single one of those pints went on to save someone else, it was worth the sacrifice. I believe in miracles. I believe that maybe God did send those helicopter crews. That maybe it was a miracle that that man survived. That maybe it is God’s work when a rescue team pulls an old woman out alive from the rubble of a building that fell ten days before. I believe with God, all things are possible. But they don’t feel very likely.

And so, more and more, I wonder. Why do horrific things happen over and over in places where no one has anything to begin with? Why do some families endure innumerable heartaches and struggles? Why do individuals battle for years with everything from loneliness to illness to addiction, begging for help from God all the time, trying to listen, trying to be open to a voice, and never seem to get it? When people pray for help, does God ever answer? Of all the people who send prayers to heaven, to how many does He truly respond?

One person’s miracle is another person’s coincidence, and a third person’s logically explained development. I have always been taught that faith is the key. Keeping faith, even when it wavers, even when one doubts, is the most important thing. And so I continue to believe, however imprecisely. But the way I believe has changed. I no longer pray for myself. It seems that all the prayers I can remember saying in which I asked God for some benefit (and I have never prayed for anything material) went unanswered. Some of my deepest needs haven’t opened any other doors for me. But it also seems that, when I have prayed for others, there have been some responses. So I continue to offer fervent, faithful, hopeful prayers for those who are ill, who are dying, who are struggling, who are seeking. Perhaps selfishness is the problem; asking for something for oneself, however deep and spiritual the need… maybe that’s not the point.

From this, another belief evolves: that we should be the answer to each other’s prayers. Since the days of Job, we have questioned whether God tests us. I think being “tested” with cancer or abuse or depression or job loss is just cruel, and runs counter to the loving and forgiving God who came to us through Jesus Christ. A God who would test His faithful with such pain is not a God I want to worship. And so I do not believe that we are tested by God. But I am beginning to believe that when we see people suffering, the answer to our heartfelt prayers that God help them… is that we help them. Maybe that is what the faiths of the world mean when they teach us to recognize the God in one another, and in ourselves. Maybe prayer is just supposed to be a way to open up our hearts, minds and spirits so that we can be angels for each other.

I do not know how best to help the people of Japan. I do not know how to help the people of Darfur, or North Korea, or Iran. There are so many who need so much. It’s overwhelming. It is easier to help those I can see, those I know, those near whom I live. I do not know how to be an angel for people on the other side of the world. I am powerless to stop their horrors, and it does not seem that God will stop them, either. I can pray for them to find food, shelter, medicine, missing loved ones, peace. And now, the only thing I ask God to give me is grace. To accept, to give, to love, and to try. Sometimes that’s all I ask for because I just don’t think He’ll give me anything else. Sometimes, I’m fairly sure it’s all I need.

Deconstructing Me

I was listening to NPR in my car the yesterday (yes, I listen to NPR, and if you don’t, you should. It can be really fascinating sometimes. If you’re older than, say, 21, get over yourself and tune in). Anyway, I was listening to NPR in my car yesterday and Diane Rehm was interviewing David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and ubiquitous Sunday morning talk show guest, about his new book, “The Social Animal.” From what I gathered, it’s about human emotion, and emotional expression where that kind of thing is generally discouraged (despite people blogging their every thought and feeling, in macro and micro form, all over the place every minute of the day. Present blogger and Facebook user included).

As is its wont when callers and emailers are involved, the conversation was unfolding in a lot of directions. But Brooks addressed a subtopic about logic and logical thought processing, and how men use that processing to stop themselves from acting emotionally.
Well, that got me thinking. I’m a woman, see, so I’m always thinking, and more often than I’d like to admit or probably even realize, it’s about why men are the way they are.

There’s this one guy in particular that I was thinking about. Now, this isn’t a gross, sappy, gag-me kind of thing, I promise. And I will tell you right now that I am actually a pretty logical person, myself. I even exhibit a lot of the behaviors Brooks was talking about: having an emotional, natural reaction to something, but squashing it because it is not necessarily a “logical” reaction. Even if it’s the kind of thing most women would allow themselves to show, I often won’t. So I get where Brooks is coming from with his point.

But what the radio interview made me think about was the deconstruction of emotion into smaller, more digestible bits of logical explanations for our reactions. This guy (who I cannot continue to call “this guy,” so let’s just name him Jack) has always baffled me when it comes to emotional things. We are very good friends and I know him very well. We have shared emotional conversations and connections over the years about a whole range of topics. He is capable of great and deep emotion. But when it comes to the emotion of human relationships, he sort of drops out. He feels things, but he doesn’t follow up on them. It’s like he goes, “Oh, wow, that’s a strong feeling. Interesting.” And then goes to get a beer.

And that’s fine. But for a guy this deep, this smart, this interesting, this inherently able to communicate and share in an unintimidating, non-gross way, why is it so hard for him to let himself really connect? He’s a study for me at this point. He does this thing that I call “the Heisman.” He lets you get just so close, and then the arm shoots out. “Okay, that’s as close as you get.” It’s fascinating.

Commitment-phobia doesn’t quite explain it. I won’t go into a litany of things about him, but suffice it to say I’ve done quite a lot of thinking about this, and I’ve always been stumped in the end. Until David Brooks and Diane Rehm revealed the truth to me: Jack deconstructs his emotional reactions into manageable logical reactions instead.

Eureka. Eureka on Route 29. I’ve been trying to pin this down for years. Thank you, NPR. Here’s some money.

Jack breaks down the big, whoa, overwhelming, gut-turning, anxiety-inducing reactions we all have, and turns them into pieces of data. He knows that emotional reactions can usually be explained in scientific ways. There are concrete reasons that we have the feelings we do. So he just takes that feeling and analyzes it, making it nothing more than the binary code of human connection. “Oh, I know why I feel like this. It’s X factor added to Y factor, divided by A factor all over B. Obviously.”

And he’s not wrong.

(Which is sometimes really annoying.)

So that led me to debate something else. If he’s not wrong in his almost mathematical, probably involuntary deconstruction of his emotions… then what’s wrong with doing it? I do it, I realized. I do it, but not to the same extent. I don’t use it to avoid establishing real, emotionally deep connections in all cases. I use it to just… I don’t know, survive my own neurosis. That’s actually pretty healthy, right? So there’s nothing wrong with this deconstruction of a big feeling so that we can better understand where it’s coming from. Isn’t that what therapy is?

This begot a theory: if deconstruction is the product of self-awareness, are the more self-aware people around us, by definition, also less outwardly emotional?

In the brief amount of time I had to think about it right then, I thought the answer was actually… well, yeah. I thought of the more outwardly emotional people I know, and found that, on the whole, they are people who I might consider a little less self-aware. (Note: this does not mean I think they’re stupid or small-minded, or that they don’t do a lot of introspective thinking. In fact, they’re not, they’re not, and they do. I’m just making an observation based on perception.) And the people who I would consider more self-aware tend to be less outwardly emotional.

Huh.

I’m not saying my hastily-comprised theory is a hard and fast psycho-emotional rule. We can all come up with exceptions. But huh.

Next question is naturally begged: since self-awareness is generally regarded as a positive attribute, is it good to be this way? Or is it bad? The answer seems to be “yes” to both. We need this kind of processing so we’re not emoting all over ourselves all the time. But we need to be honest about our feelings or we’ll shut down, close off, seem cold and distant.

The crux of the whole issue, then, becomes why? Why do some people do this? Is it fear? Fear of being exposed, of being found out, of being taken advantage of, thought a fool, hurt, shamed, embarrassed, vilified? Of being a disappointment? Doesn’t everyone have those fears? So why are certain people more likely to deconstruct their emotions than others? I don’t have the answer to that. I’m probably one of those people. It’s why I get Jack so well. It’s why I’m usually not bothered by the Heisman treatment. But this NPR interview makes me think… maybe I need to wear a little less padding.