June 19: Did God Will That, Neighborhood Bullies, Clown Fairy Tale, Sally Wen Mao, "The Bullies"

[Ives r]emembered how Robert, coming home in tears after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, had asked him, "Did God will that?"

Ives' son, Robert, asks a question theologians and Christians have wrestled with since Christ was crucified, I think.  In the face of great tragedy, every person of faith eventually runs into crises.  Loved ones who become ill.  Job loss.  School shooting.  Church shootings.  Health scares.  And the inevitable question that arises is, "Did God will that?"

My son is a good kid.  Six years old, he doesn't have a mean bone in his body.  When he goes out on the playground, he thinks everybody is his friend.  When they turn out to be less than friends, he lacks the skills to deal with the rejection.  For example, there is a group of older neighborhood kids who take pleasure in getting him angry.  They taunt him, call him names, throw things at him until he reacts.

I don't know where children learn to be mean to other children.  I have never taught my son to judge other people.  His aunt has Down Syndrome.  He's had friends who were deaf and blind.  He loves everybody.  So where do other kids learn to hate?  It has to come from somewhere.  I want to believe that people, at the core, are good, but, when my son comes to me and says that kids are throwing rocks at him, I tend to have a spiritual crisis.  I want to march over to the kids' houses, pound on their doors, and yell at the first adult who answers, "What the hell are you teaching your children?"

Dylann Roof, the kid who killed nine people in a Charleston church two days ago, wasn't always a racist.  The kids who throw rocks at my son weren't always little shitheads.  Somewhere along the line, Dylann Roof was poisoned.  Ditto the neighborhood bullies.  God doesn't will hatred and cruelty into being.  It happens because the human race is incredibly flawed.  In a perfect world, love and understanding would be the guiding principles.   We don't live in a perfect world.

Once upon a time, a clown named Giggles lived in a town where clowning was against the law.  People hated Giggles.  They ignored him, wouldn't invite him to Thanksgiving dinner or July 4th picnics.

One night, Giggles got drunk, stumbled into the town square, and startled juggling handkerchiefs.  A grim crowd gathered to watch him.  Eventually, the sheriff showed up, beat Giggles with a billy club, and confiscated his red nose.

Giggles crawled home, bloody and bruised.  He crawled into bed and vowed to never clown around again.

Moral of the story:  Clowns suck.

And Saint Marty lived happily ever after.

The Bullies

by:  Sally Wen Mao

In 1997, the days were long, the sun
bloodshot, and Mountain View, CA smelled
like duck shit.  Those days, everyone's mind

was a sex tape on repeat.  Hirsute rumors

clogged the shower drains.  When young girls
disrobed together in a locker room, rancor
smelled like petunias.  The whole stink glowed

with mutant love.  In 1999, tremors erased

my larynx.  Voice mails flooded with cackles,
inboxes sneered.  Late afternoons, my legs
greened Granny Smith-style, and I believed

when they called my leviathan.

Ovoid girl--black hair, burnt skin, snaggletooth
and sexless ruin.  I saw tumors grow the size
of California.  Nobody spat.  Only suggested.

Give this up.  Shucked each desire.

Evenings, when I was finally free, I saw crushed stars
roll into the thistle field.  On that pungent summit

I was a gutter, a bountiful gutter.  I collected
clean rain.  I was a passageway to the open shore.

Where's my fairy wand?

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