It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.
Sigmund Freud – Civilization and It’s Discontents (Norton edition, p. 29)
Dzhokhar “Jahar” Tsarnaev: the jury has recommended the death penalty.
This young man is routinely described as despicable. He certainly did a despicable thing. Despicable: Appalling, Dreadful, Contemptible, Wicked, Shameful, Disgraceful, Vile, Loathsome… ok, I’m running out of synonyms. Tsarnaev stood behind Martin Richard, an 8 year old boy, for several minutes then put down the bomb that would horribly maim and kill him and then walked away. It feels like that act is all those words above.
We want to kill him. But that was last week’s news.
Mad Men aired its final episode. David Letterman has left his late night slot after 33 years! Hundreds of thousands of searches on Google this week. Anguish is rampant on Twitter and the blogosphere. We are mourning. Ok, some are mourning. It’s true, it’s really happening.
I am not going to tell you how shallow everyone is. Although they may be. Everyone is shallow. The human condition is such that it craves food and sex and something else, too. We could call it love. We want to be protected. Television programming holds us tight in its web of unreality. It is a web craftily spun around us. Some would say that we are trapped within it and yet we don’t make much effort to escape.
Despicable men like Tsarnaev quite literally blow up that tightly spun web. The shock of reality is devastating. It feels like some loved object has been snatched from us.
Sometimes our mass produced fantasies and our ersatz late night TV homes change or go away. Our bubble of faux security manifest through a thin grid of pixels that create image cease to cast shadows where we may hide in our bedrooms and our living rooms.
I did not lose my son, blown up before my eyes. I have not lost my arms or legs. My suffering is like most others, mundane, most of the time. Sometimes we get as close to ultimate horror in the passing of a loved one even when it occurs in its own due time.
Sometimes unnamed and un-mourned grief often accompanied by impotent rage rises unexpectedly to the surface. Sometimes I attach these feelings to ephemeral pop-culture moments. Mad Men. Letterman. Straw men for my inchoate sentiments to hang upon.
Sometimes I wish I could smash something. Make my feelings real and make them go permently away. Transform my unconnected loss and alienation into a genuine object to receive my rage.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30
Oh God who is true love and unwavering protector crack me open so that your light might shine in and shine forth. Forgive my rage. Teach me to love even in the midst of suffering. Replace fear and hatred with your mercy. Let me make your mercy mine so that the world might hear your voice. Amen
Rev. Fred
5/22/15
