An Echo of Joy in a Tragic Future

There has been another shooting and tragic massacre. This one at a school. I read today it is the 18th shooting at a school in the United States this year. Eight that resulted in injury or death. Two were suicides. Some were "accidental" firings of weapons. 2018. We are not very far into the year at this point. Sometimes I avoid writing about these types of events because I feel I have so very little to add to the dialogue, to the outrage, to the sadness, the wrenching sensation of hopelessness and frustration- so little to contribute to the attempts at consolation to those grieving. But I am a teacher. At a school. Vague flashes of imaginations of a rifle-wielding younger man coming on to our campus and wreaking havoc arise in and dissipate from my conscoiusness with the potency of a heated glowing splinter of metal laid on flesh, searing and cooling, blistering. And then I think of my own young child, who, in the not too distant future, I will be taking to school. So I decided to write with hope for the process of writing to provide some amelioration, or some revelation, or some healing balm in the form of an image summoned through the merging of language, imagination and the senses' apprehension of the gifts of the natural world. But I am having the hardest time lifting above this one. It’s like the experiences are building one upon another. The only heraldings I hear from the future are so bleak I want to ignore them. All I see are subtle wars of fear; politicians reduced to stick-figure pawns of forces of vice and greed so much more complex and grand than the mirage of governmental systems; desperate journalists starving and mad for truth; artists weeping in pools of beauty melting before their eyes or grasping for it as it fades in the din of argument and industrialization; mothers and fathers clinging to their children paralyzed in fear or enraged into violent reactionism; revolutionaries confounded and paralyzed by the myriad foes they face -- and yet, somewhere out of this socio-scape I hear the echo of laughter, innocent and true. It emanates as though from the depths of an abandoned subway tunnel. There is a faint glow accompanying it, like a very small candle flickering around a corner, the flame not visible. I can’t tell if it is the fading remnants of what we once knew as joy or the undying force of humor and optimism fueled by, as Dostoevsky says, in rough translation, “an heroic deed of brotherly and loving communion.” If you have a chance to find a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, I recommend reading Book 6, Chapter 2, entitled, From the Life of the Hieromonk and Elder Zosima, Departed in God, Composed from his Own Words by Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov. There is a quote I memorized many years ago and save for times like these. Save for times when I need to remember the immense potential of individual action and freedom to choose out of a transcendent morality. When I need to remember we are in a time of radically challenging individualism, but it is not a time void of hope. The translations may differ, but I remember it like this:

“There comes a time when a man must rise himself out of the solitariness in an heroic deed of brotherly and loving communion. Even if he does so in the capacity of a holy fool. This in order that the great idea shall not die.”

The future seems to be calling for more holy fools.