I dreamed this week that our son Sam – now a vigorous young adult – was a baby again. He was only a few weeks old, a small babe lying on a bed, and I was bending over him, delighting in the sight of his soft skin, his tender face. Nearby, a rambunctious older child was roaming about, looking for trouble. The toddler boy was careless, clumsy, indifferent. I feared that Sam was in danger, and sure enough – the boy knocked Sam hard. Angry, I reached out quickly to protect him, but Sam was growing smaller before my eyes. He was shrinking. Now the older boy was clutching something like a rolled-up napkin in his fist. I pulled the napkin out of his hand, opened it, and saw that Sam, now tiny, had been crushed in the boy’s fist. Sam was barely alive and badly hurt. Overcome with horror and grief, I threw back my head and wailed.
I woke up wailing. I lay in bed and wept with a nameless, piercing sorrow. What was its source? Present-day Sam was fine – in fact, at that very moment he was participating in a triathlon. But dream-world Sam, the helpless baby, had been squeezed and squashed. My tears wouldn’t stop. I let them flow. I asked Jonas to hold me.
Into a single great river of sorrow flowed all the small rivulets of grief I’d been trying to escape. I’d been bracing against the endless headlines – the unmitigated assaults on decency, honesty, and kindness, the wrenching-apart of human communities, and the efforts to scrape, burn, pierce, and suck dry every corner of the Earth.
As far as I know, there has never been a President who cares less about the natural world than this one does. Evidence arrives day by day: the announcement that the Boundary Waters (where I paddled as a teenager) are open to mining; the push to open millions of acres of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling; the push to auction off for drilling more than a billion acres of land across the country. In its haste to tear Earth apart and to squeeze every dollar into a few greedy hands, the administration is squeezing human beings into ever-smaller areas of habitable land and squeezing the life out of countless vulnerable humans and more-than-human beings. The Big Baby toddler – in all his careless, wanton destructiveness – is on the prowl.
Broken open by the dream, I lie in bed, weeping, and accept the sorrow of a mother whose child – and the innocence and sacredness that the child embodies – is being destroyed.
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I want to see the world with a mother’s eyes. An article in the New York Times describes how Pete Hegseth – who prefers to be called not secretary of defense but secretary of war – came to see moral purpose in war as weakness. Retribution and rage are his signature stances in the war against Iran, a war with no coherent goal and no exit strategy. Perhaps traumatized by his own experience of war, Hegseth simply wants, he says, to unleash “death and destruction from the sky all day long.” Near the end of the article is an image that took my breath away. A woman in a black chador stands alone on a desolate ridge with her back to the camera. She is looking at a churning landscape of smoke after a US-Israeli strike in Tehran. What Hegseth claims to see – that moral purpose in war is weakness – is completely different from what this woman sees.
I am reminded of the grieving women who watch as Jesus is crucified and who don’t run away. I print out the photograph and put it on my altar.
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In times of trauma, everything splinters and falls apart. We are destabilized, fragmented, broken to bits. I notice that my desk has become cluttered with little notes to myself: people to call, books to read, ideas to remember, quotes to save, bills to pay, tasks to finish, next steps to take. Helter-skelter, I preside over a confusion of bits. Where should I start, when everything needs to be done and everything needs to be healed? Where do I begin?
Before doing a thing, I must gather everything up – all these people and all these concerns – and hold them close to my heart. I remember Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem and how he longed to gather up the rebellious, wayward city as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings (Luke 13:34).
Mother Jesus! Come to our assistance! Weave us together again as individuals, as a human community, and as humans who take their proper place in the larger community of life!
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In prayer I often sit these days with the icon Mary of the Cosmos, an image created by Sr. Bernadette Bostwick, a member of Sisters of the Earth Community at Green Mountain Monastery. The icon resonates with Pope Francis’ words in Laudato Si, “Mary, the Mother who cared for Jesus now cares with motherly affection and pain for this wounded world.” I consider how the universe flows through her, how she lifts up her arms in prayer, how she meets the viewer with a steady gaze. Above all, I notice how she embraces Earth and moon, holding everything together – our violence and pain, our longing and hope. There is nowhere we can go where her love does not go with us.
In the strength of her presence, we do what we can to love this Earth and to care for the vulnerable. Maybe we send hundreds of postcards to voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina. Maybe we reach out to neighbors and build trust and connections. Maybe we exchange friendly words with the person at the checkout counter or strike up a conversation with the stranger waiting in line behind us. Maybe we create a family gathering or reach out to someone who is lonely or bereft. Surely, we prepare to join an event on Saturday, March 28, No Kings Day.
And when we grieve, we share in the Mother’s tears, letting our hearts open to the love that will never let us go.
