WHAT DO WE SEE?

This photo could be a scene over Palestine as bomb after bomb lands on thin houses.  This photo could be the view from an Israeli farm, wondering when the next rocket will fly. It could be the sky over Ukraine, the sky over Iraq, the sky over Afghanistan, where red and orange and yellow do not harbor joy, but usher in another night of terror. 

But it isn’t. It’s the sky seen from our front yard, in a photo taken by my daughter, earlier in the summer, when the sun was reaching the farthest north, just before the solstice. Just after the sunset.

We’ve had beautiful sunsets in Minnesota lately, caused in part, I’ve heard, by the wildfires out west—acre after acre burning as the drought deepens and the planet gets hotter and hotter.  You can’t see the molecules that may be making the sky shimmer, and discern which comes from which source. Is it cloud, is it smoke, is it hope or is it fear?

My wife and I watched the 10 pm news last night, hoping, I suppose, to catch word of some miraculous peace, some unknowable justice that had rained down on a “conflict zone” and that now reigned instead of death.  It didn’t come.  There was a 15 second piece about Secretary Kerry demanding unfettered access to the site of the downed airliner.  There might have been a 15 second “shout out” to Gaza when I slipped into the kitchen to fill my water glass—I’m not sure.  We were told three times that today would be “steamy” with a chance for severe weather overnight.  We got something about cute animals or nice people helping neighbors, just before the requisite five minutes of sports.    

I’m not looking for an overabundance of gore, or story after story of homicides and assaults and wars.  But despite the access to “24 hour news”, it seems to me that we are shown so much that is not news that we are unable to see what is in front of us.  And so we hop from crisis to crisis: the schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria, the riots in Brazil, the fighting in Ukraine, ISIS in Iraq, the invasion of Gaza pop up into our consciousness like summer thunderstorms, rattle the windows for awhile and then pass on. 

I don’t have a ready-made solution.  I can’t tell the future.  Even though I am praying, at least some of the time I think that praying for peace may be a copout, because if it doesn’t inspire us to the kind of actions that make for peace, it is as empty as the news broadcast (No, parishioners, I’m not saying we should stop praying or that prayer is not efficacious. Just that uttering words by themselves without our spirit on the line doesn’t make a lot of difference.) 

I like to end these blog posts somehow tying it into the “Be justice. Be beauty” thing.   But I am not being either of those right now.  I am being frustrated, I am feeling broken, and I am hoping that what I can’t see I can truly hope for.

Patrick