sometimes i envy the ostriches.

not just their long necks and big eyes…though they could give supermodels a run for their money in the ‘gawky with long eyelashes’ category. it’s more the metaphorical ostrich, head in the sand, oblivious to the sorrows of the world, whose willful blindness i covet.

i’m often plenty blind, all by myself. i walk past suffering every day, calculatedly oblivious. i barely turn on my tv in distaste for what may come pouring out the screen. i live comfortably with my relative privilege and may lament what security i do not have, but i seldom question my good fortune in all that i do have.

until the world breaks in and washes over me.

until i find a post like this one Little Monkies put up in the middle of last month, about trying to ignore the CNN loop at the gym, and being called to bear witness to human suffering but being just too damn overwhelmed, sometimes, to know where to begin. being so filled with rage and despair that you think you might lose it in the middle of the YMCA. being so frantic with the insanity of it all that you run like a wild thing to try to pound it all out of you…and get nowhere.

justpostmar2007 i think this is the treadmill we’re all on, societally. it’s the treadmill that Mad Hatter Mommy and Jen at One Plus Two are trying to address and throw a spanner into with the Just Posts…which both Little Monkies and i are honoured with, this month.

i’m glad to have discovered the Just Posts. i believe in social justice. i believe in equality, in inclusion, in fairness and in voice for the silenced. i teach this stuff, can talk it with my eyes closed. but i don’t always live it very well. like the ostrich, i try not to look too hard at the gift horses i’ve been blessed with. i dig my head down most days, and think “oooh, this sand is cool and pleasant” and ignore my exposed metaphorical ass waving in the air, taunting justice’s sense of humour.

the breadth of exposed derriere on me is a little larger – metaphorically, at least – than that of most of the people i know in person, so casual platitudes and aphorisms that people for some inane reason consider perfectly reasonable things to say splatter me with grapeshot. blithe commentary about families has a particular sting…”God gives us the family we’re meant to have,” say the smug and content who’ve apparently never struggled with infertility or had their children die, not considering what their statements imply about the same God’s feelings for the rest of us who’ve been a little less simply blessed. or “i’d just die if anything happened to my children.” i don’t think people realize that dying isn’t as simple as it looks, tempting though it may be in the darkest days of grief. i don’t think, basically, that people think about the things they say. we are a society of ostriches, kicking each other obliviously in our respective tender spots while we go about fiercely avoiding awareness of pain.

yesterday, as Dave & i drove back from a relaxing, if snowy, Easter weekend at his parents’ place, the radio fed us a steady five-hour diet of grapeshot. a father whose son survived a terrible, life-threatening illness ten years ago came on to tell about their family miracle…how God intervened and saved his child, personally and intentionally. how his prayers were answered…this on CBC, people, not the 700 Club. this between news clips of the 90th anniversary of Vimy Ridge, carnage extraordinaire, and six soldiers killed in Afghanistan, all from out here in the Atlantic provinces…six more families left to grieve. and i sat in the back seat watching Oscar’s lashes flutter against his cheeks, and wondered what kind of ostrich that father must be, to speak so blindly of a grace that direct and rewarding that the hand of God personally and miraculously intervened to save his child. and i raged. not that the child lived – i am not so cold a soul as to watch my own child sleeping peacefully and wish ill on that of another – nor that the same grace passed us on by. i raged at that father because the logical conclusion of what he was saying- however devout and thankful and well-meaning his intentions – was that the parents of the dead soldiers must not have prayed enough, or properly. that the whole generation of parents whose children died as fodder on Vimy Ridge ninety years ago must not have prayed to God’s liking. somehow, i suspect not. somehow, i don’t think grace works like that. talk to those who grieve…even amongst the world’s theologians…and i doubt you will find an equation so simple. i do not deny grace…i would not want to. but i do not think you can bend it to your own will, or demand it. and i do not think being its recipient absolves you of the responsibility to be merciful – even just in choosing what you say – to those who clearly have not been so blessed as you.

i live in horror of the realization that over the next ten or twenty years i will watch Oscar learn to be “normal” by learning to shut off and sidestep his empathic response to tragedy and suffering. by learning to be less humane. by learning that nowhere is where fighting the status quo usually gets you, so why bother bearing witness? by learning to be world-weary, so young…because there is just so much to be weary of.

i am embarrassed, now, at the arrogance of my rage at that father’s innocent, celebratory blindness…his thanks for grace. i tread all over others’ wounds and absences, unintentionally, and by grace or their mercy, go on still oblivious. we do not control grace, no matter what conception we have of it…if any. grace is not within our power to grant. but mercy is…and it is mercy i want to try to model for Oscar, in hopes that he can fight off the despair that is one of the birthrights of this society. in hopes that he come to expect it of himself. in hopes that this strange, bloated, lonely culture of ours can learn to face the suffering of others head on and not shy away in fear of suffering the same ourselves.

in hopes that we do not all become ostriches, however tempting.