WOE!! and JOY
“Weeping may spend the night”, says the Psalmist, “but joy comes in the morning.”
I guess there’s truth in that; the Bible’s Proverbs say that there is a season for everything— in its poetic way, it announces a time for this and a time for that: a time to weep and a time to laugh, and so on.
But today they were not separated by seasons for me; or maybe it was just that the interval of time separating the one from the other was mercifully short.
Possibly it us just one more of my denial maneuvers, but I believe that there is another way to think about it.
22 people, 19 Elementary School children, one teacher, one Grandmother, and the eighteen-year-old who killed all the others—they all died on the 24th day of May, 2022.
On TV I watched the reports of the aftermath. I hate it that the reporters ask those who are already in deep mourning to mourn publicly. And I hate it that I watch. But it is my duty to watch; I must participate; I must join in the only way I can. I cried.
A short time later, on the same screen, an African man named Diébédo Francis Kéré was featured, an Architect who had just won the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor an Architect can achieve.
Just seeing some of his buildings on that big flat screen brought indescribable joy. Instead of the hot, windowless, dark classroom he studied in as a child, he has designed open, windowed, light classrooms for his own village. Furthermore, he created a foundation to help fund the building and he works along-side the villagers, using materials available there, to build the building. He knows that the more involved the people in the building, the more they’ll feel their ownership of it. But we saw not only fairly simple school buildings, but elaborate meeting centers and government buildings— an elaborate and breathtaking array of imaginative and sometimes even playful designs.
I participated in the joy of the beauty of his work and of his person. I cried again, but this time with tears of joy.
Joy did not wait ‘til morning. She mingles with the anguish. They lie down together and they rise up together.
Truly sometimes, they are separated in time. And for sure, in the writing about them, they are separated on the page.
But on this day, I learned again about the illogical, irrational messiness of life – how it is all stirred together in one big pot; how it burns the tongue and satisfies the soul.
And I am joyfully grateful. And deeply anguished. All at once.