The Short Run, a Requiem

"Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" -- St. Matthew 9:11

Love's Divine

Performed by Seal

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Then the rainstorm came, over me
And I felt my spirit break
I had lost all of my belief, you see
And realize my mistake
But time through a prayer, to me
And all around me, became still

I need love, love's divine
Please forgive me now I see that I've been blind
Give me love, love is what I need to help me know my name

Through the rainstorm came, sanctuary
And I felt my spirit fly
I had felt, all of my, reality
I realize what it takes

Cause I need love, love's divine
Please forgive me now I see that I've been blind
Give me love, love is what I need to help me know my name

Oh, I don't bend, don't break,
Show me how to live and promise me you won't forsake
Cause love can help me know my name

Well, I try to say there's nothing wrong
But inside, I felt it lying all along
But the message here was plain to see
Believe in me
Cause I need love, love's divine
Please forgive me now I see that I've been blind
Give me love, love is what I need to help me know my name

Oh I, don't bend, don't break,
Show me how to live and promise me you won't forsake
Cause love can help me know my name

Love can help me know my name.

 Love indeed helps us to know our name; it was ultimately an untimely end. The beginning seemed like any other -- the birth, the growing, the troubles, the training, and the boy became a man. For one young man, he was born and died in exactly the same place, almost 30 years apart. His end a shock, so utterly unexpected.

There is no dress rehearsal for life, no practice sessions; just a lot of chances for "do-overs" when we screw up. Reckoning the mistake(s) from the first attempt, often we conclude it's worth a second try to do it better, to do it right. So we try again, and many times it is better, and so right. Finally we succeed and recognize our successes and accomplishments; death is the exception, always final, a result.

Like all lives, there is little in the way of 'perfect' and many, like he did, suffer from less than perfect families, less than perfect parents. Parents often negligent or indulgent, sometimes so simply pre-occupied with their own life, they hardly notice the life of their child unfolding beneath their own noses. 

The child grows up restless, wild; in grade school the police enter the picture. They call parents down to the station to pick up this child. Again and again it happens. He learns to smoke and drink, becoming now a 'wild child.'

 As he enters high school, his often pre-occupied parents, become entangled with the police due to problems of their own. They're convicted, both for the same offense. A child with the merest conscience feels embarrassed. His family is in the newspaper; what do the neighbors, his school, his friends think? 
He cares for them all and hopes, needs their acknowledgement, their friendship. Yet these events drive him to secretiveness. He wants to hold his head, to maintain others' esteem.

...your teacher eats with tax collectors and sinners-- is written in the bible in the way of explanation for who was the person of the Christ.  He was, as it's written, one who endeavored to love his neighbor as himself, to forgo absolute judgement and to forgive those who trespass against us and others. 

With disappointments and betrayal come bitter anger, a desire to harm another. Most of us think, we could never do that... never do another bodily harm. When some one we know, care for or love comes under violent attack, even death, it's easy to think that the perpetrator is somehow so very different from ones' self. 
And yet we're human, each and every one of us. It's one of life's challenges to come to grips with this fact.

Secretiveness however, very often becomes a poison, eating away at ones' youth and early manhood. This young man continues to try and still doesn't often succeed. There are to be more contacts with the police; a wild child is trying but not winning the very thing he most wants: to know who he is and what is to be his purpose in life. With high school graduation behind him the world waits... and waits... He's not ready, doesn't know what to do.

Some how, some way he finds a path to further education, to people who support him, to the positive teacher who will inspire him; he begins little by little to believe, to unfold his protective shell. 
To believe that he can succeed, he believes more and more in himself, his natural talents and the will to gain more skills. Acquiring more companions on the way, a community to claim for his own, this young man is now moving forward with some answers to the questions that nag us all. 
A 'eureka' moment gives him the drive to try a business on his own. Wonderful.

But life, whether long or short, has its ups and downs, and tragedy. So sad-- this tragedy, a life so full, so young, so hopeful; a family destroyed now, each and every one of them. The culprit waits for his day, in jail. We mourn a young man's death. Our grief is apparent.

In Grief, Through Our Losses

Fallen
by sarah maclaughlin
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Heaven bend to take my hand
And lead me through the fire
Be the long awaited answer
To a long and painful fight
Truth be told I've tried my best
But somewhere along the way
I got caught up in all there was to offer
And the cost was so much more than I could bear
Though I've tried, I've fallen...

I have sunk so low
I messed up
Better I should know
So don't come round here
And tell me I told you so...
We all begin with good intent
Love was raw and young
We believed that we could change ourselves
The past could be undone

But we carry on our backs the burden
Time always reveals
In the lonely light of morning
In the wound that would not heal
It's the bitter taste of losing everything
That I've held so dear...

 “It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls.” —St. John Paul II

As many have learned, grief is the normal, inevitable response to many types of loss, not only death. In grief we feel something is altered, gone from us that we can no longer retrieve, and it prompts sadness. As an experience, grief of all types is more prevalent than death itself. It is highly specific to a given individual due to ones' unique characteristics, interests and relationships. For some, grief is a response to shattered assumptions about life, and ones' life in particular. It encompasses a complex of emotions, cognition, existential and spiritual coping as a response to many, many life events. There is a disintegration of existing, established life structures previously full with meaning.

For some grief is much like the feeling of fear, gripping one with yawning stomach and fluttering feeling. For many it seems to persist for a very long time.
The writer C.S. Lewis wrote a story concerning grief, A Grief Observed, later made into the movie, The Shadowlands with actor Anthony Hopkins.
In mourning losses, there begins the process, often first a sensation of numbness and shock, intense emotions often with a non-linear process. The one in grief may feel things such as anger, sadness, shame, regret, hostility over a period of time.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft called grief "God's jujitsu." The grief experience itself may be what allows many to overcome their grief he writes, to move beyond that initial point.  He asserts that God used the force of the devil's own evil to defeat the evil one.
We can endure evil and suffering and be strengthened. Writing in his book, Making Sense Out of Suffering, Kreeft writes of a deeply human account of compassion, the act of suffering with, and examines how religious traditions view this near universal human experience.
And many find ourselves fallen into a malaise, a gnawing sense of sadness, that things just aren't right. Maybe we're a bit angry too. In grief it is not only other people that cause us to feel loss, but also life events occur which result in losses less obvious. Perhaps it's the loss of earlier, more simple times, loss of health, loss of ones' good name or reputation, attacks to ones' character or the alteration or loss of a parent, friendship or marriage, maybe through a sense of wrong doing or maybe just by distance.

What ever the initial cause of grief, it is felt by many most keenly. All those involved in these situations mentioned above may remain alive and well, though separate and apart. This can and does prompt for many, strong feelings of grief, of loss.
Sorting through these varied and complex situations and emotions over time likely results in a healthy accommodation to a new, revised reality in which one finds the energy to move forward. As Saint John Paul II wrote, grief is a type of suffering which may indeed clear the way for a new, transformed existence.