My daily commute
includes three choices on the car radio:
NPR for news, ESPN for sports, and a public broadcasting rock station (a
unique genre, by the way).
I have avoided
the NPR button of late. The primary news
item is the killing of 20 school children in a Connecticut elementary
school. Such news only weighs on my
shoulders and creates pain in my chest.
There is no
rational explanation for such an act.
Plenty of people are postulating theories, but the young man who pulled
the trigger, and the mother who raised him, are both dead. They have each left pieces of evidence behind
– all of us leave trails of some sort in our lives – but the scraps may never
equal a clean accurate picture. We
humans are too obtuse and complex for that.
But the event
itself is not the only reason for my aversion to broadcast news. Ingesting this news every morning, at the
same time, from the same source, spoken by the same voices, can become
overwhelming. Or repetitive. Or numbing.
Or all of the above.
I am reading Jan
Richardson’s book “Through the Advent Door” during this season. She writes of the ‘little apocalypse’ events
that occur frequently in the Bible – events or actions that either foretell
something much larger, or that lead to social upheaval, or that represent a new
sign from God. Richardson notes that the
Greek word apokalupsis, from which we
derive the English word, also means ‘revealing’:
Though
we most often use the word to refer to a destructive ending of momentous
magnitude – namely, the end of the world – at its root, apocalypse simply means
revelation: how God unhides Godself.
In the context of
horrific events such as the killing of 20 young children, this presents a
semantic conundrum. I certainly view any
such act as an apocalyptic one -- deadly, destructive, the end of life for so
many. It may also lead to significant
social action in this country, as we reevaluate whether it makes any sense
whatsoever to permit killing machines to be easily available, and whether we
are truly helping individuals who suffer from emotional and mental disorders.
But what is revealed? There are those who use this to argue that we
have taken God out of the schools and if God were spoken of more often in our
schools, such killings would be less prevalent.
But God isn’t so easily niched:
there are no closed doors to God’s presence, it is not as if God belongs
in some places but has to avoid being in others just because we say so.
The reveal at Sandy Hook Elementary may be
much more basic: God exists in all such places.
We can say Yahweh – that which could not be spoken. We can call out that spirit in Adam
Lanza, in each of those children, in the kid wielding a gun in a Denver movie
theatre, in the cop or the medic who first enters such a scene. God may be hard to find amidst the evil, but
God is. God can be revealed in all.
I may still avoid
the news button on my radio. There seem
to be too many apocalyptic events, even though my rational mind tells me that such
events have always occurred. Given the existence of poverty – physical and
spiritual -- on one side of the human ledger and selfishness on the other side,
such events in all of their forms will likely continue.
We will seek
Yahweh’s spirit in all scenes, whether a ‘little celebration’ or a ‘little
apocalypse’. Advent calls us to listen and watch, to be ready.
