the boys…
The Penn State coverage has sickened me…I have seen enough timelines, read enough editorials…I have and still pray that justice rolls down like waters…and I mourn for the boys.
If you could rise above and look down on the storm you might see it as a kind of silence, a wordless betrayal of trust like Gethsemane’s kiss, the muted shock of a sparrow flying into the kitchen window whose pane was just clear enough to beguile the senses and look like sky. That’s how it might look if you could rise above. But no one sees like that, none but the eye of God. From below, inside the trespass, there are tears: this is not how things should be. Much of life can be toyed with but boys are ordained to run and play in evening sun then safely dream in pieces beneath patchwork quilts, to inch taller toward the light, unashamed, farther into the slow goodbye.
John, on Wednesday I had to write about giving grace to Joe Paterno as part of a project that I participate in. I had to tell some of my own secrets too. You are right to say this is not how things should be. But I am still trying to figure out how we seek justice and love mercy at the same time. Just thinking about the whole mess at Penn State brings hate of self back to me. I would wish it otherwise. Maybe you could slip a little prayer in for me too. c
Carolyn, justice can roll down and mercy rain in a variety of ways, often in ways opposite of what we think/believe…its seldom, if ever, clean.
And yes, I slipped a prayer in for you…I could use one too.
John, it is my honor to pray for you.
Powerful words that not enough boys know of. Reminded’s me of quote that I wrote down the other day when reading Anne Frank:
Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”
― Anne Frank
Potent quote, Mike…thanks.
John,
I’ve mulled these words over several times today. There’s a gravity to this piece, a discomfort. The way you start the fourth line with such a beautiful word if divorced from the context of the preceding line, how it makes me feel creepy when read in context. Your line breaks are incredible and I feel weird even saying that because of the subject matter…. which makes me like it even more, oddly.
You do well to explain what was lost in PA, what’s been lost in so many other communities, the cruelty of thievery.
Christe eleison.
Seth, thanks for your response…my hope was to conjure discomfort, if not dis-ease…I’ve wondered recently if at least some of those 20-something males still living in their parents’ basement playing XBox are boys who were sexually wounded at a young age…if that might be the case, then staying somewhere safe (parents’ house, cyberworld) is a little easier to understand…just a thought.
You have shared beautifully of God’s heart on this matter, and from the perspective that first needs to be seen…God’s perspective is always to love and heal first, the broken. What I also weep for, is the attention being paid to this situation because of it’s societal importance related to high profile persons and the god of sport. The countless children… girls in far unimaginable quantities, and boys, who are sexually abused, incested and raped without so much as a whimper of sorrow ever being heard for them… or by them… are for whom my heart also cries. This ugliness in PA only illuminates one snowflake in a blizzard of pain and destruction wrought by perpetrators on our victims, They are our victims. All the victims belong to us as surely as they belong to God.
Jennifer, yes, I am afraid the victims are legion…maybe some church or minister somewhere will focus their Advent thoughts this year on ‘the slaughter of the innocents’…maybe some brave church or minister…
I wonder how the earthy justice impacts the survivors. How do they process the fate of their abuser? Will it truly heal them? One thing I’ve learned is that vindication isn’t as soothing as we often expect. That bitterness can eat away at the soul even after justice is served.
Still crying from reading this….
Thank you, John, for fighting for boys. For these boys especially.
Thank you for reposting these powerful thoughts, John. I did not know you in November, so missed this back then. This topic is so very difficult, so tender to the touch that it’s hard to stay there very long. But I hope your prayers were answered, and that some brave pastors somewhere preached on the slaughter of the innocents during Advent last year.