Author: Doug Harrison

When tragedy hits, we ask why.  It is visceral, perhaps even instinctual, and almost involuntary.   For the past 48 hours I have mostly sat quiet in my house, mostly alone, listening to people process an unthinkable event, a moment of real evil.    How did this happen?  How could this happen?    Thankfully one of my friends just said it outright, “How can there be a loving God in a world like this.”   We want to understand, we want to explain, at least in hopes that we can make this happen less often.  We dwell on the moment, on the suffering, and ask ourselves, “How can this make any sense.”   But this violence does not make sense.   It never will, nor should it.  There will never be a thought pondered or a sentence uttered that could ever make any one of us pause and say, “well, yes, now I get it.”   This is simply evil.  There is no sense inside it at all.

I woke this morning painfully aware that everyone who is going off to Church today is going to light the odd pink candle in their advent wreaths and celebrate gaudete Sunday, or more poignantly stated, Joy Sunday.   It feels like a set up.   This whole thing seems staged, doesn’t it?   And just in the mere poetry of the whole thing it makes the day feel like it wants to be ironic, a cruel punchline, a bit of sarcasm from a most awful god.   But this is not irony.   It is a confrontation.  It is a vocation, a call to change.   This day in Advent says God has nothing to do with that violence, at least not yet, and it is time for that to change. 

I am an overly cautious driver to begin with, so when I know I am in the Texas hill country at night, and I have already seen 3 deer carcasses that day and five times as many deer warning signs, It is all I can do not to slip in a paranoid hawk-like state seeing antlers around every bend that actually just aren’t there.  In this country you have to anticipate Bambi if you want to make sure you keep safely on the road without a set of antlers wedged in your grill.

But, as I mentioned,  I am an overly cautious driver, which means I do not merely adjust my behavior to the possibility of coming across a deer at night, I base all of my behavior on the likelihood that Texas deer are suicide bombers viciously luring 4×4 Doge Rams to a most fiery and gruesome death.

I feel fairly certain my con-deer-acy theory is far fetched.  What I am also aware of, however, is that the expectations I bring to the road, especially when it is unfamiliar, radically changes how I actually approach it. 

I was terrified the first few times I went to confession several years ago.  I mean, I had grown up in a church that really didn’t like the practice of making confession at all.  In fact they thought it was a bad thing and defied one’s personal relationship with Jesus. We kept a lot of things private back then.   

So most of what I thought confession would end up being was based on bad scenes from movies that made priests look either like bitter curmudgeons with a bone to pick or like sick, judgmental voyeurs. Nevertheless, I felt like this is something I needed to do and wanted to do. I was surprised, shockingly surprised, by what I ended up saying.

“I’m losing my friend,” I said…  and then I froze.