"Holy Madness"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
March 15, 2009

As the news of Esme Kenney came out last week, first that she was missing, then the rest of the horrible details, we were hit by shock after shock.  It was dreadful, and we couldn’t take it all in at once.  Esme was such a wonderful child; everyone who knew her says she was special.  How could such a thing happen to her?  She did not deserve her fate.  The difference between her goodness and the evil that befell her is incongruous.  I just doesn’t make sense.  I have struggled with sadness about her all week.

A couple of our teens and Adults were in the Our Whole Lives class with her over the last several months.  At a grief counseling session for OWL families Tuesday night led by our District Executive, Nancy Combs-Morgan, I saw people in profound distress.  One of the counselors, Steve Sunderland who co-founded a support organization for parents of murdered children, www.pomc.com, talked us thru the feelings Esme’s parents and the rest of us might experience.  Steve was also a co-founder of Fernside, a non-profit organization offering support and advocacy to families who have experienced a death. Fernside also offers peer support for grieving children, teens and adults. www.fernside.org  If anyone is having trouble with feelings about this tragedy, I encourage you to see me or go to the Fernside website for help.

As you may know, there was a memorial service for Esme’s School for the Creative and Performing Arts on Tuesday night and another one at St. John’s UU Church on Wednesday afternoon.  The meeting and services were helpful, it was good to be with people who loved her.  It was good to be with people who cared for each other, who gave and received a lot of hugs.  As I looked forward to our worship here on Sunday, I wondered what I could say that would help, and just where our congregation would be in the process of dealing with Esme’s death and the outcry afterwards.  As the week went on, I heard more and more anger and disbelief – in the news, and from the people I talked with.  Nothing about the loss of Esme seems right!  Nothing - and nothing can make it right. It soon became clear to me we should spend some time talking about the quandaries this senseless death has presented us.

The facts of her death make us confront a very uncomfortable reality that the innocent can be killed; she was killed by a horrible person, and our system of protection and justice did not prevent it.  We are not only sad about her, we are afraid for ourselves and our children.  Esme’s murder reminds us that to be innocent is to be vulnerable to those who would hurt others, an inescapable weakness of the human condition. And Esme is not just a symbol, she was a real person to us, a precious, irreplaceable, individual member of our community.  This happened in our neighborhood, members of our congregation live right next door to the Kenneys.

Our anger at what happened is real and we should use the energy that comes from our anger to see that real and specific improvements in protecting our community happen.  To simply accept her death as inevitable would mean going back to our lives more scared and more resigned to the dangers of life in the city.  The ghosts of Esme and all the other innocents who have been killed haunt us; they ask us to examine our consciences and to save others from their fate.  To honor Esme’s memory, we should live lives of substance, lives that make a difference to our families and that make our communities safer and more life giving places.

They ask us to confront the cultural norms that say it is OK for some people to fall through the cracks of the mental health and justice system and inevitably for some innocents to die.  They ask us to confront the idea that civilian deaths in war are simply “collateral damage,” or that dictators who torture and kill their own people shouldn’t be stopped because of national sovereignty.   They call these ideas madness, but those of us who stand against them are often called mad – wide-eyed liberals, whose crazy notions are too idealistic for the real world.  Given the terrible history of humanity’s mistreatment of innocent people, maybe one has to be mad to continue believing in the possibility of divinity, or in the inherent goodness of human nature.  But I say we should be mad, we should continue to be provide crazy ideas for a better world.  We should try not to remember Esme solely through the circumstances of her death, but instead to think of her music and poetry, her quest for knowledge and her buoyant personality.  We must also refuse to see life through the eyes of those who are willing to simply throw away so many members of our society and world.

Elie Wiesel, whose experience of the Holocaust caused doubts about the goodness of God and humanity, has for decades now asked the question, [Given our memories] “How do we manage to humanize destiny?”   The memories he refers to of course are those of the inhuman, ungodly acts perpetrated by the powerful Nazis on the innocent Jews and others.  His questions asks, “If people are capable of doing that, how can we reasonably hope for better human behavior in the future?”  The murder of Esme was no less horrific and it demands we answer his question. “How can we believe in working for a more loving society when we witness people acting with such depravity?”  Is our faith in the capacity of human beings to do good strong enough to overcome our insecurity and our despair at the inhumanity we have just experienced?  Maybe one has to be mad in order to go on believing.

At Esme’s memorial service someone who was in deep pain said to me, “At times like these, maybe it’s easier to rest in the assurances of the promise of an afterlife.”  I could tell she needed some help with the losses she was feeling, and that maybe her UU faith was not giving her the answers she needed right then.  To be a UU is precisely to question one’s beliefs, to surface the contradictions within your psyche, and to love yourself even when you don’t have the solutions.  I know this is not always easy.  I also know that living with contradictions can make us feel spiritually fragmented, and a little crazy sometimes.  But, if this madness creates in us a need for spiritual truth, if it makes us strengthen relationships and create meaningful lives, then it is a holy madness, and I say be mad, UUs, be mad!

In his book, Somewhere a Master: Further Hasidic Portraits and Legends, Wiesel provides us “a list of ‘truths’ communicated by a great Jewish teacher,” practical truths for UUs driven a little crazy when bad things happen to good people:

1. Do not give up – even if some questions are without answers-go on asking them.
2. Doubts are not necessarily destructive-provided they bring one to a Rebbe. (for our purposes I would substitute “wise friend” for Rebbe)
3. One must not think that one is alone and one’s tragedy is exclusively one’s own; others have gone through the same sorrow and endured the same anguish.
4. One must know where to look, and to whom.
5. God (or divinity, or goodness) is everywhere, even in pain, even in the search for faith.
6. A good story in Hasidism is not about miracles, but about friendship and hope-the greatest miracles of all.

Wiesel’s spiritual advice is good for each of us as we process the events of this last week.  It tells us we can question with our hearts, embrace our uncertainty, and go back out into our communities in spite of our insecurity.  It appeals to each of us to use our faith to change the course of history, respecting truth, valuing friendship, and accepting the burden of holy madness – of believing in our liberal religious values when our world seems upside down.