The Cross Behind the Stable

What is there to write about what happened in Connecticut yesterday?  What should we feel as we watch surreal images cross our computer or television screens.  I have vacillated today between numb emotional distance to wanting to squeeze my children tightly with tears.  Suffering happens everyday around the world to innocent children.  We read about it in magazines and papers, watch documentaries, and maybe send a check to a distant child in Africa.  But yesterday's events seem so profoundly strange and painful because of their familiar proximity. They seem like they could have happened in our own backyard.  The town, the school, and even the little children seem so eerily similar to our family's 'safe' life here in the Chicago suburbs.  My gaze has lingered on my girls today. I watch their little profiles, their giggles at the Christmas tree, and I wonder at the painful horror of this world that has robbed other parents of this joy.

One of the most helpful things I've read is an article by New York Times journalist Ross Douthat titled "Loss of the Innocents."  You can read the whole article HERE.  He leans heavily on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Ivan's argument against God.  He invokes Ivan's argument asking,

"Why should [man] know diabolical good and evil when it costs so much?." 

Many of us have asked this very thing today.  Our eyes fill with tears as we look at our own children, love them with a love that hurts,  and struggle to feel mocked by evil in the seeming randomness of a terrible act.  Writer Douthat is helpful in reminding us that God revealed himself in story, a story of human suffering, a story in which he himself entered as a helpless child.

He writes,

"In this, the Russian novelist was being true to the spirit of the New Testament, which likewise seeks to establish God’s goodness through a narrative rather than an argument, a revelation of his solidarity with human struggle rather than a philosophical proof of his benevolence.

In the same way, the only thing that my religious tradition has to offer to the bereaved of Newtown today — besides an appropriately respectful witness to their awful sorrow — is a version of that story, and the realism about suffering that it contains.

"That realism may be hard to see at Christmastime, when the sentimental side of faith owns the cultural stage. But the Christmas story isn’t just the manger and the shepherds and the baby Jesus, meek and mild.

The rage of Herod is there as well, and the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death." - Ross Douthat