WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE, is a question for which there is no satisfactory answer.  Theologians, Sunday school teachers, pastors, and parents perhaps should sometimes get a passing grade for trying, but just for trying, not for shedding any light on the subject or moving the debate closer to an answer infused with joy and hope. 

YESTERDAY I DID A VERY BAD THING... INADVERTENTLY, IGNORANTLY.  To help my hanging plants get safely through a brief hot, dry spell, I sprayed wildly... not knowing until later that a wee hummingbird carefully attached her nest midway down on a hanging ivy tendril. As I was putting the hose away, my eye followed the frustrated flight of the little bird hovering and circling the great mass of hanging ivy. Then I saw it.  The miniature nest full of water... with two tiny perfect white eggs.  Very carefully I tilted the water out.  I didn’t touch the eggs. I went to sleep last night worrying about what I had done.  This morning I checked the nest, and the little bird was sitting on it.  I’ve been checking through the day, and she’s still hanging around, but mostly not on the nest. I’m hoping for the best... which is sometimes the only thing we can do when something bad happens.  

If only...  If I had known...  If...

  

It’s bad enough... and sad enough... when something destructive happens with no malice aforethought.  While I was drifting off into sleep last night thinking about what I had done to interrupt the beautiful determination, the natural working through life of the little bird, I remembered the piece in yesterday’s paper about those people in Kentucky who gave their five-year-old son a “starter” rifle for his birthday... I revisited my shock at learning that there is actually a gun manufacturer making child-colorful little real rifles they call Cricket which they market under the slogan, My First Gun... I popped wide awake again.  I thought about the little boy who accidentally shot and killed his two-year-old sister... as innocent, both of them, as the little humming bird nesting in my ivy. I thought about the residue of grief and anguish  that will hover around the little boy through his whole life.  I though about the parents and their grief and their ignorant, unintended culpability and the informed, shameful culpability of every single member of Congress who rejects any attempt to place controls on gun sales and gun ownership; and I thought about the culpability, however remote, of every teacher and pastor and parent... every citizen who, for whatever reason, continues willfully to hold to a misunderstanding of the meaning and reason for the Second Amendment of the Constitution:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The Second Amendment was ratified on December 17, 1791 along with the other nine amendments that make up the Bill of Rights.  Who, I wonder, were the history teachers of the people who use the amendment as their reason for insisting that government should not regulate manufacture and sale of guns?  Have they not bothered to learn the differences between the United States in 1791 (population under 4 million in 16 states) and the United States  in 2013 (316 million by the end of this year in 50 states)? 

chaos is a game with no rules...

the storm splinters houses,

interrupts everything...

hindsight alternatives

don’t comfort...

it doesn’t help anybody to insist

that my father

shouldn’t have started smoking

in the first place...

the trick is keeping the faith,

whatever form it takes...

it has to be enough to hope

that order will come eventually

maybe...

and not give in to despair 

when solace is brief

after the fire in dry brush

comes roaring through...