Hands, Prayer, and Grief

November. Twenty miles outside of the glittery pit that is Vegas there are five red hand prints on sandstone in a quiet crevice of Red Rock Canyon. Tens of thousands of years ago, someone mixed up some paint from berries and mud, and pressed their hands against the rock. The iron oxide made those prints red. A chemical miracle preserved them, day after day, year after year, through blistering heat and cold, sand, water and wind. We're not so different, those hunter-gatherers and those of us standing beyond the fence, gawking at their art. Because we've pressed our own hands into paint and onto paper, onto walls, into wet pavement so many times in our lives. Our prints, unlike these, won't reach through the next ten thousand years because we live in such a disposable world.

A word about Vegas, for example. Vegas is cigarette smoke, six-inch heels, slot machines that only accept credit cards or pieces of paper with bar codes(you don't even pull a handle, anymore), the scent of jasmine filling every crevice of your hotel like cotton. It's beauty and hope and sex and failure all neatly packaged in unimaginable, themed hotels. If you're content in life, and you love where you live, Vegas will help you appreciate that all the more. But away from the plastic and lights and a lot of people trying to forget they're unhappy, minutes into the quiet desert, where the mountains are craggy and solid and unmoving, and the landscape below is flat and scrubby, the Joshua trees are works of art. Regal.

Fast forward to December, and an unimaginable event in Connecticut.
 “Help. Help us walk through this. Help us come through.” Anne Lamott, in her newest book Help, Thanks, Wow: the Three Essential Prayers, calls this “the first great prayer.” It’s what so many of us pray for sick family, for friends whose lives are newly broken, for those who are mending, for lost jobs, for people we don’t even know who have lost children.

 But mostly, right now, for Newtown, Connecticut.

In this season of Advent, when many of us celebrate what we believe is the historical arrival of the most significant child in history, the deaths of so many children in an act of senseless violence is jarring for even the most faith-driven. Lamott says her prayer is sometimes, simply, “What on earth could You be thinking?” God’s answer, she says, can be found in what God told Job: You wouldn’t understand. That answer seems apt now. Lamott says that we will all be expected to “survive unsurvivable losses, and that we will realize with enormous pain how much of our lives we’ve already wasted with obsessive work or pleasing people or dieting.” Maybe that’s one of the things suffering-whether it is our own or the pain or that of someone else-is meant to show us. Don’t waste any more of it. 

 Then you say, Wow, because that’s a prayer, too. I say it when I’m driving to work (just miles from where another fatal shooting captured national attention in 2002 at the Appalachian School of Law.) Every morning, a breathtaking panorama unfolds during my commute as fog fills in the valley below, like a milky white creek, lapping at the tallest hills. I prayed that word on that trip to the Mojave Desert in Nevada, where five ancient Indian hand prints have survived centuries of abrasive weather and human indifference. I walked among the yucca plants and Joshua trees to stand before this rock wall and image of those hands, fingers spread as if they were pressing against a glass pane separating our century and theirs. I wanted to put my own hand against them, to find some similarity with this primitive person who is reaching through thousands of years. I couldn't because the conservancy (and rightfully so) protects it with a tiny rope and sign that say we have to say back. So I simply said, Wow, in the quiet realization that we are both molecular in this universe, yet so significant.

That’s what children teach us.

 In that moment especially, I missed my preschool son, who was back home, sitting on a rug in his elementary school classroom singing his letters. He would have pointed at the dark shadows between these mountains and wondered aloud how many dinosaur bones could be carved from them. He would have touched the sharp needles of the yucca plant with the tiny, delicate pads of his fingers, and explained to me that the needles protect the plant from predators, because he’s just begun to learn about mammals and their predators. He would have seen those hands and asked if someone finger-painted on that canyon wall, musing that they look just like the pictures hanging on our refrigerator at home, the ones he made at school. And I would have looked at him like so many of us do with our children and said,Wow.

When I saw the first reports from Connecticut, my prayer was only Help; we are mute with grief in those first few hours. I have continued to pray it since, because the effects will reverberate throughout those families and those first responders for months and years. Now, in our last week of Advent, many of us will say, Thanks, even for grief, though we may not always feel it, for one child who symbolizes them all, for the hope of moving forward.

 In the midst of the chaos 
When the wind is howling 
 I hear the ancient song
 Of the ones who went before
 And know that peace will come -Susan Stauter