No Words for This

Mallards paddle peacefully in the clear winter morning, slicing the lake outside my window.  Pencil-thin wakes ripple behind them, destined to merge with the still water and disappear in watery anonymity.  A male duck with a hunter green head bathes in the sun’s glitter, splashing drops of silver wealth abroad like sparkly confetti or coins: freely distributed alms for the poor in spirit. Beauty, peace, and provision invade my soul.  All is well.

America the Beautiful simultaneously recoils in horror as a gunman ruthlessly shoots down 28 victims - young children and adults - at a Connecticut public elementary school.

Of course the ducks can’t know this.  They see only through the eye of their senses in moment-by-moment immediacy.  And yet they also hear an inner voice – we call it instinct, which seems much too clinical for something so mysteriously right.  They’re limited, and yet in some mystical sense, exemplary.  

I hear the news through the postings of Facebook friends, and run to Google for details, panting and breathless and reeling.  The ducks congregate in the sunlight while I pore over the computer screen, stunned and numbed by brutal facts. Human philosophy, logic, and science melt away.  Academic contemplation and reason mean nothing. The raw news is beyond all that.  My head spins. I blink hard.  There are no words for this.

The choreography outside intensifies; a pair of mating ducks flap wildly and almost walk on water against a majestic backdrop: blue lake mirroring endless sky.  

In my mind’s eyes, grieving mothers replay last night’s bedtime stories and this morning’s Cheerios. I envision peanut and butter sandwiches sitting in untouched lunchboxes. 

I focus outside again, but beyond obvious, earthly boundaries this time - beyond the lake, beyond Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, and even beyond my own thoughts and imagination - to embrace the truth: His love…endures forever.  (Psalm 136)

Selah.