On writing prayers after a tragedy.

I was asked to write prayers for a short service in our Chapel yesterday. We were - together with the rest of Connecticut - honouring Sandy Hook Elementary School in the wake of its terrible tragedy just a week ago. All over Connecticut, people, trains, buses, corporations, shoppers, stood still for a few minutes to honour the school's victims, 26 children and adults who lost their lives in senseless violence.

We decided that in our Chapel we must also pray for the perpetrator of the tragedy, and for his mother who was the first to die on that awful day, but who seemingly was not named in the list of victims. It's a gospel imperative to pray for one's enemies, even when there is horror at the chaos and suffering they cause. It's also a gospel imperative to pray for "outsiders", which is what the perpetrator's mother has become in this story. Luke's gospel in particular shines the spotlight over and over again on the ones who are forgotten in the story: the women, the indisposed, the disabled, the sick, the helpless. Outsiders get treated with suspicion because no-one quite knows whether they are "one of us" or "one of them" - but the gospel consistently calls us to break down the barriers between insiders and outsiders, and to welcome even those who make us uncomfortable and afraid. So we prayed for all the victims, in this tangle of tragedy and violence.

It's hard to pull all of these needs together. I have no problem recognising every one of the 28 who died at Sandy Hook as a "victim" - for even the boy with the gun was, in a sense, a victim of his own tragic behaviour. But the swirl of agony all around us makes articulating this highly sensitive. How do we pray in the same breath for the child who dies and the man who killed her? How would I do that if it was my child? It cannot be done glibly. We cannot reduce these jagged emotions to a neat equation.

I was put in mind of Henry Reed's famous poem, Naming of Parts -

"Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
We have naming of parts." 

Naming the elements of a tragedy in the clinical, rote way that Reed suggests can seem to keep it at bay, distance the visceral reality from ourselves, and thereby convince ourselves that we have somehow dealt with it, without ever having to enter into the feeling of it. But writing a prayer (a real one) is none of these things. A real prayer is a thread for the community to hang on to, not merely to name the parts, but to give the grief, the horror, the anger, a means of articulation so that the pain is out there, out of the confusion of our heads and hearts, so that we can begin, in tiny steps, to face it and come to terms with it.

Too often we get ravelled up in whether it was "said right". There is no right, I think. At least, it always feels to me that even my best efforts never quite say it right. I struggle with saying it right when I write books, or sermons, but nothing - nothing - is as hard as writing a prayer in a time of tragedy. It's as if - in the Psalmist's metaphor, which Shakespeare stole and reappropriated - my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, portcullis'd behind my teeth. The blank sheet seems surrounded by agonised faces and the cries of the wounded. How do you put words to that? and what is even the point?

An eloquent prayer is quite easy really. Name the parts. Say it beautifully and you can keep it at arms' length. But a real prayer costs tears and blood even to write down. It hurts, because it engages with actual feelings, your own and those of other people. You know as you write that you are attempting to give words to the speechless, and you do so because they need them. But you also know that you are treading upon their dreams - per Yeats - so you have to tread softly.

So it is that writing a prayer for victim and perpetrator is nigh on impossible, but it has to be done. It has to be said. We are less than human if we fail to pray for our enemies, fail to remember the forgotten ones, fail to let our prayer return to us as a call to forgive, and help, and heal, and seek to change our neighbourhood into a more forgiving, more attentive place.

Today I return to writing my manuscript. Unlike a prayer, this is thousands of words, not just a few. Tracking down footnotes can be a tedious business, but as I work the hollowness of Christmas for so many in Sandy Hook is ever present in my mind. So even in tedious work, I feel grateful for the gift of an ordinary day to do ordinary work. May we never take such days for granted.