Sunday caught me by surprise. I was suddenly awakened in the end of the day to incomprehension. (I’m on vacation and caught the headlines late.) My soul aches knowing the power of fear and hate making more news.

God surely weeps at the violence we inflict on each other. With guns, with words, and with neglect.

I can’t explain this act, this hate, this guttural misunderstanding, to my children in a satisfying way. I don’t have those words. I can’t fill that void.

A mass-shooting at a gay nightclub, or maybe a movie theater, or another classroom of children who wear shoes in the same size as my daughter. The swift and stumbling steps of my own relatives running for their lives in the Haun’s Mill massacre so many decades past. Mormons have been acquainted with injustice and assault of our own, our ancestors knew fear and fell in pools of blood. Being so familiar I can’t pretend not to feel their wounds through generations past and see the maiming, the carnage upon others.

I cower at the ample allowance God gives us (and Themselves) for grief. The opportunities and depth astound me.

If there is one thing I know, one thing I believe, it’s God’s love. Unending, unknown and incomprehensible. So great and good and binding that in the end it will be the only thing.

Frustration, sorrow, anger, yes. Oh, God knows it, yes. But love is the first and last. There is only love and the absence of it. Even then, in the end, God’s love through us is the only thing that can open wide as the whole world and swallow that whole.  

The Vow

How could I hide you from hate?

I would

Though my arms break

With the trying.

Life leans in at the window there

With its bag of dark treasures

Trying for your eyes

So utterly open, so unaware.

You will see men smile over blood

And you will know there is hate.

You may see bombs and butcheries

And you will know

There is horror.

Against all this what can I do?

Only vow that before

You leave my arms

You will know

Past ever doubting

That there is

Love, too.

–Carol Lynn Pearson