Editor’s Note 07.23.2012:  This post is normally replaced with a new one on Monday morning.  However, it has received such accolades that we are leaving it up another day.  Please consider sharing it with family and friends.

Mortal Moments

Our mortality and awareness of how near it is came strikingly upon us this weekend. We have been nudged, nay pushed, into a full fledged awareness of how fragile all of life really is.  Someone makes a choice, an evil, menacing choice and others’ lives are literally devastated and ruined.  Little to be done, at that moment but flee and hope and hide. Some were fortunate, figuratively speaking.  For they will never overcome all the horror of those few minutes in a darkened theatre.

The rest of us stand aside, wondering at the pain and heartache going through the sinews of one’s body and the receptors of one’s spirit and mind. Those who were there, right there, in the tragic mix of a real life tragedy being played out all around them, know.  It is a time for silence, now that the guns are stilled and the screaming has been translated into sobbing.

Now, will begin the debates over how and why and should it have happened and how it could have been prevented.  There will be those who will decry everything that may have provoked this insane and brutal moment.  There will be those who will turn their heads and deny any need to wring one’s hands over it.

But, for those who know how deep pain penetrates, it will be a time for serious introspection and genuine challenge of a culture that is producing very angry and anxious persons who have no center, are aware of no anchor to hold them steady in the storms of current life and living.

It will be those who do have a core, a center, an anchor who will need to prevail, just as they did on Saturday night by coming to the fore, by being ready to demonstrate courage and to hold back fear and evil.  There are always people like that at such times.  They feel impelled and compelled to act out the essence of heroism, the depth of human caring, the miracle of bravery.

The Real World Requires Compassion

Striking back with rancor will not heal the wounds.  Raising our fists, wrapped around more weapons won’t change what happened that dark night.  It will take more understanding than we know we are capable of having.  It will require more compassion for those whose crazy, mixed up life is on the verge of tipping over. It will mean that we need to find avenues of relief for the hurting and pained interiors of souls we wish we didn’t have to live around.

This is our real world where mortal moments occur regularly.  This is our real world where the more we invest in caring, the more we will reap the rewards of persons being healed of soul, mind, spirit and center.

The triggers that are pulled in the beings of those who take such desperate measures must be quelled.  To be sure, the guns alone don’t do all the damage, but they make it terribly catastrophic for those who are on the other end.