Guest Column: a Homily on the Newtown Tragedy

By Susan McBain

This Catholic homily for the 3rd Sunday in Advent was sent to me by a friend.

The shootings at Newtown on Friday come down like a knife slicing this season of Advent in two. I keep looking for a word of faith to say on this 3rd Sunday, but it’s hard to locate that word.  Because the essential Good News of the season comes to this: the Lord is near. That’s what is hard to hear, in the context of two dozen families so uselessly assaulted.

And that it happened to them through the vulnerability of their children. It’s like the heart of the season’s blessedness has been sacrificed, cut out.

I can only presume that the families and their friends out east are searching for nothing more than companionship in grief. That companionship might be good news, that would help. Companionship in grief is important for us, not just for explanations or solutions, but to dwell for awhile in the loss.

Amid many exchanges of email, a friend sent along a meditation, a kind of practice, to help people like ourselves, We who are distant and yet angry or sad or searching.

It’s a Buddhist prayer that was sent, and I just want to pass it along.

It comes from the point of view that there is a kind of redemption in letting our hearts break. And dwelling with your own breath in the events that have happened. And as is so true of the Buddhist spirit, we are urged to appreciate that we are never separated, there is no division in our human family.

And so, the teacher says,
Open your mind and your feelings to the people who are harmed, feeling what we can of their suffering.
Beginning with the parents, how they are in our hearts.
Breathe in with them: may I take even the tiniest bit of your sorrow and rage into my own heart to relieve you of it. That’s what stirs there now.
It is already moving, you can feel it, out beyond their life to ours.
And in return, I send you my strength. What strength I have. Give that.

Breathe in their suffering. Breathe out your strength.

And then consider the children who lost their lives:
breathe into your feelings for them as if to say
For all of you who may be even now
wandering or bereft or confused, conscious spirits now;
we know something of that confusion. Confusion is with us,
and hope, and astonishment.
We go through this as a communion of souls.
Let this come as it might.
And in return I offer, we offer, a little of the peace we do have.
If only the peace of breathing and silence for a few moments.

Breathe this in: their suffering and confusion, Breathe out your peace.

And then: For all of you children who lived
lived through this horrific day: to be willing to open up
to learn, to remember our own childhood sufferings.
May I take in something of your fear and your nightmares. Breathe in.
And I send you my bravery.

Breathe in their suffering. Breathe out your bravery.

Breathe in their suffering. Breathe out your confidence and compassion.

Then, as best you can, relax your mind and sit quietly for a few minutes.

This is a compassionate act of the heart,
drawing toward yourself the children killed,
the parents and families, the children who survive.

And then we come to see that we cannot leave out
that young person who committed the crime.

Is there a way to appreciate the common and difficult pain the killer carried, not different from our own. Our own corners of violence. Our reactionary selves. Can we let God come near to where we really live too close to violence?

And this reflection brings up similar events that occurred in 2006 in an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.
It’s as if their extraordinary response to the invasion of their lives, shooting five young girls, releases spiritual power even now.

The Amish moved somehow with a natural grace toward forgiveness, actual love of the murderer.
They outnumbered all the mourners at his funeral.
They embraced that man’s bitterly grieved family.
Somehow, their way of life, is open to that healing power.
Of forgiveness and personal love.
One reporter told how an Amish farmer held the father of the murderer in his arms, just held him for comfort, for a long time that afternoon.
You probably remember, how the work of reconciliation was larger than any other aspect of the story.
It still seems real and important.
Like the nearness of God, God’s Advent, came out of the darkness and touched many people, touching us living even now, after six years.
This also shows what human beings are capable of.

Today’s Gospel speaks of people
who were coming to feel a new need for God,
and who were willing to experience that internal need together,
at the river. In such a moment, such a place, we’re all welcome.
We are not cut off: John the Baptist gave everyone permission
to feel their own broken hearts and the deeper life we wait for.

The moment prompts us to wonder what we can do,
in our longing to make a difference.
John the Baptist, when asked this question,
did not encourage religious speculation or even praying to God.
Instead, he pointed to very practical things, things that would have
an immediate positive effect on everybody.
He encouraged bringing your conscience to your workplace,
being honest, putting human beings first in your behavior.
He took for granted that we all are in this together.
It’s not enough to survive in hard times on your own.
You have to start asking, how are WE doing right here and now.
in the office, the pastoral staff, the classroom, the nursing station, the family.
Who’s hurting, who’s under stress, what decency and affection
from me–from you, might help this situation?

So along with enlarging our imagination toward the people of Newtown,
along with noticing our heart toward them and sending them blessing,
along with recalling the powerful witness of love and forgiveness
six years ago in an Amish farming community,
we are charged to pay attention to each other.