elizabethlevett

Hail, holy queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope… (From a prayer my mother taught me when I was small.) War. And that feeling that comes. That feeling when you’re full of sadness and don’t know what to do with it. This past weekend we’ve seen dozens of deeply disturbing images of war in Gaza. Not since the Holocaust have so many Jews been killed in just a few days. Innocent civilians are made to suffer and die on both sides. Again. Everyone I talk with has a different opinion. The most troubling are comments that suggest Israel had it coming. It serves them right. But I can’t reconcile myself to such a simple and cruel dismissal of this present conflict. There is so much backstory that we can’t access. So much complexity we aren’t touched by. Again. All I do know is that ordinary people, people who may well object to the policies of their government are bearing the worst of the situation. I keep thinking of the ways we dehumanize others, and in doing so dehumanize ourselves. On this October Monday, I think of Columbus and his men arriving in the New World and the way they treated the indigenous people they found here, of the four hundred years we spent loading ships from the African continent with human beings stacked like lumber and how those who survived faced torture and enslavement, of Wounded Knee, of Dachau, and on and on. Because we felt we were right to use our power to subject or injure or destroy others. Because we felt entitled by what we decided was our own sacred claim to the ineffable, unknowable divine — to subdue the other by any means necessary. I find my attention drawn to the little Quan Yin statue in my garden. Quan Yin was the mother of compassion, whose tears, shed for the suffering of humanity, brought into being, the Bodhisattva — a savior, an intercessor. Mother of god. Mothers of all of us. I think of the mothers in Israel and Gaza and even in Europe, whose children have been, and continue to be victimized, and what these mothers are facing in this most recent time of war. In the afternoon I walk uphill to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Ignatius and light a candle. Hear us, mother of mercy. The irony is that I find this concept of divine tenderness, divine mercy, is universal. It occurs in some form in every religious faith. When we approach the divine in prayer, we invoke the nature of mercy, of forgiveness, of peace. And yet, we go on with our inhuman, but all too human destruction and cruelty, justifying it on the basis of divisions we imagine exist among us. The most deeply troubling conundrum of our constant denial of who we really are. Children. Children of the same mother. Mother of mercy.