I wish we Unitarian Universalists were more willing to simply let our hearts break when they ought to break:

(The language gets worse, so turn the sound down now if need be. I expect I’ll turn autoplay off tomorrow, but today it stays.)

I remember the three steps in which the Newtown shooting became terribly real to me. The first was thinking, “Sandy Hook? Isn’t that where Scooter was the caretaker for his step-grandfather?” You Little Rock folks know who Scooter is.

The second step was reading my friend from  Fayetteville, Geri, had moved to Sandy Hook–did I remember that she’d moved there? I sure won’t ever forget it–and that her son was right down the hall from the killings.

Then step three was a one-word post on Facebook from Lee Tomboulian–“No”–at the news that the daughter of someone in his circle of New York City jazz musicians was killed, and at that point, it all got very intimately inside my heart and head real.

We intellectualize when, and what, we should feel. How many victims–twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight? Good question. Here’s an answer: Who cares? Isn’t this terrible enough without quibbling over the details? Can’t you just let your heart break?

I’ve tried since then to read everything her parents put on Facebook about Ana Grace Márquez-Greene, to let it sink in and try to imagining what this must be like for them and their son, and to repost it with “Never Forget”.

I missed some, but I’ve tried, and now here is a bit of what her mother had to say for this anniversary:

I remember my six year old’s last words: “There’s something for you under my tree!” This is what she told the bus driver in the last moments before her death. The final words of a first grader. . . .

Sweet Caramel Princess,

Today I feel like I have an apple stuck in my throat. I am having trouble breathing as the memories come in like a flood. Two years ago we were waking up on a day like today to a nightmare that has still not ended. Your daddy went to take out the trash and there were reporters lurking in the bushes. Isaiah was huddled in his bed with a far away, glazed look in his eyes unable to get warm. I was unable to feel my arms or legs. You were not in your bed. The sound of the helicopters above made our small house shake and made conversation impossible.

The lump. The lump in my throat is knowing I can only have you as an angel when I just want you in my lap…

…We would trade everything to have you back. Even for ten seconds. I would give my all to kiss that sweet spot under your neck. . . .

I take comfort in the things we taught you in the short years we had you. Your life was well lived. You knew how to love. You knew how to live. I am so glad we let you make messes. I am so glad we gave you lots of hugs and kisses. You indeed lived a Beautiful Life . . .

Love,

Your Apricot Mami

Ana Grace loved Jesus, people and food. She also loved dancing, music and fun. She loved Canada, CT and Puerto Rico. She loved the sun. She was a real girl who was really murdered on December 14th, 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

That it was necessary to say “a real girl who was really murdered” is  disturbing. A mutual friend of mine and Geri’s, a nice guy despite being around the bend on conspiracy theories, told her the killings were a hoax. His “evidence” trumped her and her son’s eyewitness.

Skepticism is so valuable, valuable in particular when it is turned on itself. Rigorous self-honesty and constant critical thought can help you know where you embraced logic yet abandoned reason, where your skepticism became the worst form of gullibility.

When UU theologians refer to the “idolatry of reason” (a term I so dislike), this is typically all or part of what they’re talking about.

Emotion is sometimes dangerous when it disregards reason, but reason sometimes goes off the rails when it disregards emotion. The gut check of conscience can solve ethical problems our conscious mind evades or ignores or refuses to confront.

Sometimes that refusal to confront reality is based in pain or fear. UU theologian Sharon Welch put me onto the wonderful fiction of Toni Cade Bambara. I can do no better than to quote them:

Minnie Ransom [a character in Bambara’s The Salt-Eaters] sees such an avoidance of pain frequently in her work at the infirmary. She tells of an incident in which a woman came to the infirmary “clawing at her hair, wailing to beat the band, asking for some pills. Wanted a pill because she was in pain, felt bad, wanted to feel good.” The woman was overcome with pain because her mother had died. Minnie was appalled: “Her mama died, she’s supposed to feel bad. . . . Bless her heart, just a babe of the times. Wants to be smiling and feeling good all the time. Smooth sailing as they lower the mama into the ground.”

Which is not that far from Mike Cooley’s vision of the fundamentalist endgame:

So be it if they come to find out feeling good’s
as easy as denying that there’s day or night at all
til what it takes to feel a thing seems so far out of reach
they just claw their skin and grind their teeth and bawl

But I didn’t have these resources–Cooley’s song, Bambara’s novel, Welch’s theology–two years ago. I had to push through a day of grieving people everywhere with what I had at hand. I mean, there was at least one grieving person inside me. It felt like more.

That night, Patterson Hood and the Downtown Rumblers were closing out a tour. As a courtesy to fans who can’t attend, they let a show taper stream his signal on the internet so those of us at home could listen along. It was a lovely, heartfelt performance.

I know the song “A World of Hurt” very well and have been comforted by it on more than one hard occasion. When that intro started, I knew that what had to come that night finally was coming and that I was going to cry like a baby. It was exactly what I needed.

I cried all through writing this, too, through listening to that performance a few times, through writing about it, through thinking back on that dreadful day, through thinking about what the future might bring–

–and right on cue, there’s my daughter, feeling bad, so I must pause and take her temperature–

–and she’s okay–

–and while I remain ultimately optimistic, I’m was pretty sure then and just as sure now the crying isn’t over, by a long shot.

So what do we have, anyway? Three chords and the truth? A majority of people in a society run by a majority of money?

We have a lot, and one thing is the ability of art to bring us through life.

What Patterson Hood did for that crowd in Nashville–and for all of us who were connected to them that night, and for all of us who are connected to that performance right now, here in this age of local loneliness and world-wide connectivity–is sacred work. You don’t have to believe in the supernatural–I don’t–to believe in the sacred. Neither do you have to believe the people who do sacred work are anything more than ordinary human beings. Talented folks, or brave folks, or determined folks, beautiful soulful folks who do The Work.

What we do is who we are.

When anyone works with the raw material of people’s hearts and minds and lives, and transforms crushing grief, perhaps, by filtering it through persistent joy and turns it into something both beautiful and bearable, a bandage worn over a wound like a badge of honor.

And that is sacred work. No matter how it’s done, no matter what the intent, no matter how banal or strange or boring or downright freaky the method. Method just doesn’t matter. What counts is lives lifted up and hours filled with mercy, beauty, and joy.