The Sediment of Violence

It was with strange anxiety and sadness that I awoke today to hear the story of a woman from my former congregation who was murdered. While I did not know Christine, the story impacted, and my heart goes out to those who knew and loved her.

In the wake of this tragedy, thoughts emerge in my mind around the story of personal violence, and the impact it leaves on all our psyches. Christine was a lover of wetlands and of art--I connect to her poetic attraction to ponds, swamps, parks, beauty. News stories capture her, as a true Unitarian Universalist, committed to living an authentic life and putting her values into action. I am drawn to read the books she authored on wetlands--having endeavored in my own way to capture the spirit of such places in poetry--such places which have received me in times of death, reviving my soul in the midst of winter. It was by wetlands where Christine's body was discovered, in a park I have visited with my family on a few occasions. As mourners gather to vigil tonight, in the hour before the Unitarian writers session, reaching out to one another in the struggle for comfort, at a loss for meaning, I wrestle miles away with the sediment of this tragedy.

This is, sadly, not the first time murder has entered my religious life. When I was a child, an 85 year old woman in my church, Mary, was killed by an intruder in her home. Mary was a poet and lover of beauty (she admired my mother's church flower garden...), and my mother has somewhere books of her nature poetry. As a young child, I heard the stories of violence--murders and rape by strangers, by partners, by spouses; silent suicides; abuse-- whispered and spoken aloud, and they seeped into my consciousness. Today I hear them still--not in news stories remote and distant as one would hope--but in the periphery of communities--families, churches, shared acquaintances. It is these stories which settle and linger around the edges of our lives; it is another way of viewing the landscape.

There's not really an understanding of what to do with the sediment of violence and harsh loss. It can appear anywhere at anytime, it seems, as much as we wish to predict its course and segregate it to detached quarters of the world. We are, as the wetlands know, interconnected. So while my husband returns home from work with the tales of his immigrant students, with the too-common stories of gangs and machetes in the city of Newburgh across the river, there is at the same time the hushed violence of suburban well-to-do families. Some is routine perhaps--the angry shout, the slap to the face--but simply unknown to the world, shoved behind closed doors. Other acts of violence seem to appear from nowhere--as if one day something just snapped. There is more here than we presently know.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, knowledge of Christine's death brought with it a strange anxiety. Recently, I read the story in the UU World of a mother who wrote poetry to heal from her daughter's strangulation by a man she had dated. I also heard recently from the voice of a good friend--a fellow lover of wetlands and environmentalist--how she found her life disturbed by a man she once loved at an earlier point in her life. And while she swore that he would never have harmed her, the tale of his pervasive stalking is enough to leave anyone to wonder--who then can we trust? I wonder this sometimes myself, hearing stories of people I think I have known and trusted, and creepily disturbed by the thought that we may not really know what dark thoughts lurk inside each others' minds.

The quest to end this kind of violence then is more than simply calling for a ceasefire--of guns and swords and human abuse--though this is most certainly a part of the story. But violence can never truly end until truth is revealed, and we are able to give voice to our hidden consciousness in the comfort of one another's gaze. In the words of Carl Jung, "What we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate." Last night I dreamed of hurricanes, a giant snake, and of broken windows. I don't know fully the meaning of this dream, or of others. But something which I do know is that to heal our world we must also heal ourselves. Together, listening to the dreams and the losses we share, the hidden emotions and thoughts, maybe we can begin to find our way, to reveal and to heal the darkness that lurks beneath algae-covered waters.

At least it's a hope that we might begin.