How Great the Darkness: A Prayer for Newtown

December 17, 2012Caitlin Desjardins

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Editor’s Note: Article originally published on State of Formation

Oh God, how can we ever understand? This is evil wildly beyond comprehension. Are you the one allowing this? Could you have stopped it?

Could we have?

God, who I believe to be Merciful, who I hope to be Healing: let us know you grieve with us today. Let us feel your tears on our skin, your wailing carried on our wind. Do not, do not be silent today. Nor tomorrow. Do more than hear our screaming. Scream with us, oh God.

Do not leave us alone with our questions. You said, after all, that all who mourn will be accompanied. Accompany us and honor every one of our whys. If our questions cannot be given answers today, help us to love the questions themselves. Help us, in all our thinking and speaking, to repudiate every attempt at easy answers.

Help us, oh God, to face this affliction fully, without turning from the possibility that you are yet love, and we can yet love.

May you surround each adult and child, so tragically departed and those still holding to life, with pure and complete light. May pain flee the body and all anguish fly from the soul. May each victim know himself or herself to be fiercely loved, tenderly held, wholly healed.

May you descend in ways and miracles I cannot imagine on the families whose fabric has been ripped, whose security shattered, whose hearts feel burned to ash. Do not ask us to hold in our anger. While we ultimately hope for the redemption only you can bring about, do not let us speak of such too soon. Would each family today experience nothing but compassion. Would the gross tragedy of their loss be matched by the overwhelming kindness of those near and far. Would Peace arrive, however slowly, and descend upon Newtown: each family, each hospital room, each parent, child, student, teacher, brother, sister.

May you give renewed energy, vigor and strength to all those responding to this tragedy: searching, calling, doctoring, securing, investigating. May each worker be given the grace to accomplish what needs to be accomplished without closing off their grief.

Give us all the grace of grief, knowing that peace comes only within and on the other side.

May we hold renewed appreciation for the importance of mental health care and let go once and for all of the stigma we perpetuate and the sense of superiority we too often rely on. May you raise up counselors, therapists, hospitals, addiction groups, and the loving ears of friends today, oh God: for those in Newtown and all those who need and desire to be heard. Would today’s tragedy open new channels of healing for all those who struggle inside. Would today’s tragedy remind us, again, that violence never heals and renew in us a passion for non-violence.

Oh God, how can we ever understand? How can we live in a world with such darkness, where children are collateral damage to our violence and hatred?

And yet…it is Advent. It is the time when we remember that you HAVE NOT left us alone. That you have come, in a body just as vulnerable to gunshots as the bodies of teachers and children. That you know what it is to be murdered and to grieve those you loved and lost.

Oh God, Oh Christ: remind us today and every day that you, indeed, are our light. And no matter how great the darkness—and the darkness is so great—you are the light who has come to overcome. 

You are the light that shines in the darkness.

And the darkness cannot put it out.

 

Tagged as: Advent, Darkness, Light, prayer

  • Lee

    Thank you for the eloquent prayer. However, I almost did not read the prayer because of the second sentence, “This is evil wildly beyond comprehension.” Mike Huckabee on Fox News basically says the same thing. I understand the temptation to name something we do not comprehend as evil, but why not something like, “This act is wildly beyond comprehension.” instead? I appreciate your words about the importance of mental health care. This kind of naming leads us toward comprehension and light. Thank you again for the meaningful prayer.

  • Butler from memphis, TN

    “…We must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers.” —Martin Luther King, “Eulogy for the Martyred Children” (1963)

  • Frederick

    But where does the darkness and the now all-over-the-world dramatized universal psychosis come from?
    it is of course created by human beings. Which is to say that there is no “God” in charge of and creating history.
    Human beings do, and always have.

    The humanly created world is mad. Humankind is in a constant state of extreme psychosis – dont you know!

    The fiction of separateness – and the denial of the universal characteristic of prior unity – is a mind-based illusion, a lie, a terribly deluding force, and a profoundly and darkly negative act.
    The individual and collective denial – and active refusal – of the Universal Condition and Intrinsic Law of prior unity is the root and substance of a perpetual ( and egoically self-perpetuating) universal crime against humanity, performed by every one and all of humankind itself.

    In the present-day, the culture and politics of illusion controls the entire human world. There are 7 billion human individuals (and, otherwise, large numbers of competitive and mutually dissociative groups, cultures, traditions, races, religions, corporations, and nation states) that are, characteristically (and even strategically), out of touch with each other – like dust, and bombs, and petty traffic, all blowing in the wind. That wind steadily blows all prior unity into the bits and particles of human chaos and cultural devastation.

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