June 18: Bewildered Expression, South Carolina Shooting, Sally Wen Mao, "Hurling a Durian"

And then Ives blinked and found himself standing on the sidewalk beside his wife, across the street from the Church of the Ascension.  On the pavement, just by his feet, was a large piece of canvas, and under it a body, stretched out.  Then the officer lifted off the canvas and shined a flashlight onto the face to reveal the shocked and bewildered expression of his son.

Ives' son is the victim of a violent crime.  He's shot on the steps of his church by a teenage boy named Danny Gomez.  Gomez, raised in poverty by a single mother, is the victim of a society bent on keeping the lower classes as low as possible.  Robert Ives and Danny Gomez both lose their lives because of the world's inequalities.

Last night, in Charleston, South Carolina, a 21-year-old man entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and sat down.  He prayed with those gathered for a Bible study.  After about an hour, the man stood up, took out a gun, and began shooting.  He killed nine people and then fled.

The police now have a suspect in custody.  His name is Dylann Roof, and Roof's uncle told reporters that his nephew received a .45-caliber handgun for his last birthday.  But, the uncle added, nobody in the Roof family saw "anything like this coming."

Once again, the President of the United States had to have a press conference, consoling victims and condemning an unspeakable act of violence.  A church.  People praying and reading the Gospels.  Once again, the alleged shooter is a young man scarred by a culture of racism and violence.

Very little leaves me at a loss for words.  Tonight, this tragedy does.  I'm not going to turn this post into a diatribe on gun violence in this country.  I'm not going to talk about a culture that simply can't shake off the chains of racism.  There's too much finger pointing going on right now.

Tonight, I'm going to pray for the victims in Charleston.  I'm going to pray for the victims' families.  I'm going to ask God to bring comfort to members of the Emanuel A.M.E Church, who lost their beloved pastor.  I'm going to pray for my country, that the ugly wounds of poverty and racism may be healed somehow.  And I'm going to pray for Dylann Roof, who obviously needs help.  And forgiveness.

Sally Wen Mao has a little poem about the difficulty of forgiveness.  I'd like to share it with all of you this evening.

Saint Marty needs to believe that forgiveness is possible.  That's what being a Christian is all about.

Hurling a Durian

by:  Sally Wen Mao

This is the fantasy fruit:  it can awaken
desires lodged deep inside a person

                but stuck, like an almond clogging
                the windpipe.  The smell of a durian

may erase a child's immediate memories.
So I am addicted, of course.  Not to eating

               but to sniffing it like glue, my fingers probing
               its dry, spiked surface until they bleed

and I eat.  But the feast disappoints
me because its taste replaces the corpse

               scent with something sweet and eggy,
               a benign tang I flush down with wasabi.

For there is nothing a kid like me
can do except awaken to loss and wish

               for a seven-piece suit of armor.  The deisre
               always returns:  durian as a weapon of truth.

Even if I don't know how to pull a trigger
or whet a knife, it's tempting to imagine

               throwing a dangerous fruit at the head
               of the person who failed you, who hurt you,

who, for all these years, has tried to break
you.  But this desire is lodged deep

               for a reason:  the pull of forgiveness
               like a hopeless gravity, and always I try

to resist.  So I do by taking a spoonful
to my lips, savoring the smear, the din

               of my cleaver hacking the husk, the juice,
               the sweat ripping open the rind.

Hold your nose and eat