Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?
I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows weak because of all my foes.
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.
*****
A compilation of Psalms and other verses.
I put this together for a friend, who asked me to pray for one of the many incomprehensible cruelties that are happening in our world right now. "groanings too deep for words" The phrase has been in my mind since the 2015 Paris attacks, when, as I stood in the hallway of our University spiritual center, the images on the public TV screen burned themselves into my brain. The students laughing and walking past me echoed in my head with horrible dissonance as I struggled to understand how the world hadn't stopped to mourn the bodies on the screen.
They had fallen limp as they ran out of the building, their blood still visible from the helicopter recording the live footage. It brought back into painful focus images that my younger brain could not comprehend at the time: 9/11, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora.
They had fallen limp as they ran out of the building, their blood still visible from the helicopter recording the live footage. It brought back into painful focus images that my younger brain could not comprehend at the time: 9/11, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora.
And suddenly it became incessant,
San Bernardino 2015
The Isis Bombings: Jakarta, Istanbul, Brussels, Baghdad, Libya, Phillipines, Sri Lanka, too many and too terrible to even name
Aleppo
Orlando 2016
Fort Lauderdale airport 2017
Little Rock 2017
Las Vegas 2017
Sutherland Springs Church 2017
Parkland 2018
Santa Fe 2018
Jacksonville 2018
Pittsburgh 2018
Thousand Oaks 2018
Virginia Beach 2019
The Boeing crashes 2019
Kyoto 2019
Hong Kong 2019
And just in this past week: Gilroy - July 28, El Paso - August 3, Dayton - August 4
This is by no means a full list, only the ones that have haunted me; a documentation of my thoughts. There is no war, there is no fair fight, just senseless violence and disregard.
2018 Thousand Oaks
"Let us weep together.
Since the Paris shootings, I've been haunted by the images of similar events happening around me. Every moment of quiet I had, I couldn't stop a flash of those images in my mind: sitting in class, in a movie theatre, waiting for the elevator door to open,.. I've had dreams of being on the ground and watching strangers fall around me as a man relentlessly guns them down. My heart is broken and my life seems even more insignificant. I don't know how to live my life seeing these things happen. I cry for God to tell me what to do. One survivor who had the courage to help others get out said "I know where I'm going when I die so I just did what I could" I don't know that about so many people around me. I weep for this world. I don't know the dead. I don't know the shooter. I don't know the survivors. But I can see the pain from this violence that is so far beyond comprehension. I see the guilt in the faces of the survivors. There is little relief to be found in surviving beyond giving purpose to that survival. Let me not rest but restlessly live to love others. Let me not waste what blessings are given to me in the time that I am given. Let me not lose this heart that breaks for these evil events. Give me the strength to do more than I think I can so that more could be saved in my stead. Give me the perseverance to sacrifice myself for others who do not yet have hope. God please. Give me the wisdom that I don't have, to reconcile these thoughts and defeat doubt."
2019 Virginia Beach
"Elsewhere there are wars. Elsewhere there is political, religious, even social unrest. Here, in a country as undeniably privileged as ours, we have attacks. Violence without comprehensibly justifiable reason. Selfish, individual, and shortly thereafter, denied. Legally obtained high caliber, high capacity weapons continue to kill the innocent people that legality is supposed to protect. It's not a stance, it's a statement. People kill people. But the bullets sure do help.
https://everytownresearch.org/mass-shootings/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/27/upshot/deadly-bullets-guns.html "
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/27/upshot/deadly-bullets-guns.html "
It's been 4 years.
3 Have mercy on us, Lord, have mercy on us,
for we have endured no end of contempt.
4 We have endured no end
of ridicule from the arrogant,
of contempt from the proud.
for we have endured no end of contempt.
4 We have endured no end
of ridicule from the arrogant,
of contempt from the proud.
-Psalm 123
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_linked_to_ISIL
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