I just finished watching the movie We Bought a Zoo. It's a lovely little story about a widower who packs up his two kids and moves to the California hills to rebuild, renovate and re-open a zoo that had been abandoned.
The principle character Benjamin is a risk-taker and adventurer but he hadn't ever dreamt of losing his wife. The story revolves around complicated family relationships and our struggles with loss and life and pain and somehow a message of hope breaks through saying that that our strength is just not in our ability to persist but as well in our ability to start over.
So many people are having to deal with loss and death and pain and starting over at the close of this year. I look at the lights of Hanukkah and the Advent of God-made-flesh in the world and I wonder at times if the Darkness is not making another horrendous effort to snuff out what goodness remains.
I mourn for the children and adults of Newtown and mourn for ourselves that our personal rights outweigh our sense of responsibility to community and the resulting suffering from this enormous lack of equanimity.
I wonder if peace is on earth or if it is ever to be found. Is the Kingdom coming or has it passed us by? Did we miss it among us while striving, fighting, debating, complaing, wanting, longing for more?
And yet I know that somehow indeed light shines in the darkness and it can only shine if I allow it to shine in me. So I take on garments of praise and gratitude amidst the sorrow that fills my heart of needless deaths, loss relationships, and unrealized futures.
I invite in the light to heal the dodgier parts of my soul and remind myself that I yet have family, friends, co-workers and ones I love around me and in addition to them I am never really ever alone. For thou art with me, the shepherd-psalmist scribed.
So I go to the nephews' basketball games and cheer and console them as they lose to a much taller team and tell them there will be another game again and they gave it their best and played and didn't give up.
And I remind myself that that indeed is the challenge for me because I'm still in this game and I must play and never give up because somewhere there is someone who needs a light to shine, a salve to heal, a heart to mend, a zoo to rebuild.
