Anything that brings us together with another person can become an occasion for prayer. Empathy and sympathy can be forms of prayer. In seeking to feel or to see the perspective of another person we can better understand ourselves and the human condition.
It has taken me a while to get over the heat from last week. It was a dangerous heat. I have been to Tucson and Phoenix and Nepal and New Orleans. I have lived in southern Ontario in the summertime, but I have never experienced heat like last week in British Columbia. More than 700 people in BC died from conditions related to the heat during the four day period. The village of Lytton, BC encountered temperatures of 49.5 degrees (121.1 degrees fahrenheit) and was destroyed by a fire days later. The extreme heat was a natural disaster.
A week later I feel like we are still recovering. A friend of ours had to repair some plastic shelving in her apartment that melted in the heat. Our back deck got so hot that some minor repair will be required.
For days we avoided going upstairs. The hallway was almost unbearable. I remember walking into the closet/office off our our bedroom and experiencing the space as ine that was on fire. It felt like we were being sent into a disaster zone to quickly retrieve what we could. If we had to go in there to get some clothes, the determination was to do so as quickly as possible. It felt dangerous to stay for even a moment longer than necessary. Now, days later, it is as if the space carries a memory. It is not hot there anymore, but I can feel a memory of a kind of trauma. This is how the occasion has taught me to pray.
I have heard repeatedly that people who suffer violence or other kinds of trauma can carry a lasting association with the space, the room. They can remember vividly certain small details of the space and blank out over major pieces of the recollection.
When I go into the office/closet space in my house I have been seeking to use the memory of the heat last week to inform and shape how I think of people who have suffered terrible trauma. I have shed tears at what some people must deal with in spaces holding terrible memories.
One of the first stories in the Bible is of a traumatic and violent murder. Cain kills his brother Abel. Since pretty much the beginning of human history, terror and violence have been present. God confronts Cain about the murder. Cain may have assumed that he could have covered it up or lied about it, but God says to Cain that “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground”. The ground carries the memory of trauma. It is remarkable that the ground can cry out like that.
It is more remarkable that God hears the cries.
Perhaps a first step in sharing the suffering of others is to think about how a space can cry out from what people have experienced. It is not an easy or comfortable thing to open yourself to such darkness, but it can be a way in which to better love people. It is easier to keep your distance. It is easier to blame others for the debilitations of their sorrow. Somehow though, in seeking to be aware of how trauma has impacted others we discover our own humanity.
For Christians this ought to be a matter at the heart of faith. Jesus showed us the pain and beauty of such a way when though he was “in very nature God, he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped.” Instead he took on the nature of humanity and accepted even death and even a wrongful, terrifying death.
Who would do that?
Who would, upon hearing the “blood cry out from the ground” or sensing the pain of another person, choose to take it into themselves? The passage quoted above goes on to say that this, in the end, is what shows us Jesus’ divinity and draws all of history to him. What if he hears the cries of all the trauma-infused land and somehow takes it upon himself, and in doing so overcomes all the darkness that ever was with a glorious Light?
Dear God;
I don’t like even remembering that heat from last week. It was oppressive. Help me to see that such remembering can enable me to be more mindful of the suffering of others. Help me to see what the call of Christ is, that it is to be moved towards all humanity. None are left behind.
The heat, the land, a sound - may they be instruments of drawing us closer to one another. May they be instruments of showing us how close you are to all of us.
Amen
Such great writing. So meaningful. So insightful.
I felt the oppression in your description of your closet.
My house was so hot. But I have a basement. My basement became my haven, my reprieve, my chosen space. I created a mini kitchen. I was so grateful for my cool basement. It had been just a basement. Now I felt so blessed to have it.
So sad for those in apartments, condos, rented rooms, seniors’ homes or those with no home. How did they find reprieve…how did they relieve their oppression, their suffering, the depletion of their energy….
We have been challenged. We who have lacked for little have been leveled. The pandemic and the heat are real for all of us. We are on the same ground that cries out.
We will long be reminded of the pandemic.
The memory of the oppressive heat will be seared in our minds.
Maybe we will have been changed…..awakened.
That is not a bad thing.