Bye, bye, Lully, Lullay.

The lovely Madelyn Simone’s book-of-the-week is King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub. In this charming narrative, the king is in the bathtub and won’t get out. As the members of his court try to coax him out of the tub, the oft-repeated line is simple: “who knows what to do?” When we read these pages together, Madelyn often echoes that question: what to do, Nana, what to do?

Reeling from the reports of tragedy from Newtown, Connecticut, that question has been on our lips often this past week. How could anyone enter a school and kill twenty elementary-age children and the adults attempting to protect them? Who knows what to do?

Our feeble attempts at making sense of this tragedy have flooded the airwaves, the newspaper pages, and the Internet.  We’ve talked about it at the dinner table, in line at the grocery store, and from the pulpits of our churches. Why? Who knows what to do?

 

A chilling commentary came from Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. "It doesn't mean that everybody doesn't get a feeling in their gut when they hear that a bunch of innocent people have died at the hands of one crazy gunman, but it is no longer a story that we've never heard before. So there’s a certain ritual to it – we know what to expect.” The endless babble of the talking heads, the comfort of the president, the vigil candles, the mental health experts with minimal answers, the makeshift altars of memory – there is a recognizable feel to this. We’ve been here before.

 

And so close to Christmas. In the slaughter of these innocents, a shadow has fallen across the morning of December 25. Yet it’s a shadow with a familiar cast for those who’ve read the postscript to the visit of the Magi who traversed field and fountain, moor and mountain to follow a star of wonder. In the midst of the joy to the world that celebrates the coming of the Christ-child, we shiver in this verse from Matthew 2:  ^“When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.”

While we have a myriad of Christmas carols about the babe in a manger, we seldom sing about babies in a morgue.  The closest we come are a few lines tucked away in the third verse of the haunting Coventry Carol. Herod, the king, in his raging, Charged he hath this day His men of might, in his own sight, All young children to slay.

In the face of this ageless pattern of tragedy, I cannot get away from Madelyn’s question – what to do, Nana, what to do? We begin with what teacher Janet Vollmer did for the children in her Sandy Hook classroom in the aftermath of the shooting; “We just held them close until their parents came." We hold our children close. We assure them of our love and our protection. We pray. We keep vigil in silence. We grieve with those who mourn.

But this cannot be enough.  One Canadian friend posted this on his Facebook page: “Why is America silent about the slaughter of their hope (their children)?”  I was livid when I read his words. How dare he say that about my country, about me?  But in the long shadow of Columbine and the raw silhouette of Sandy Hook, we must prove him wrong. The hard questions of mental health treatments and policies must be raised. We must weep and wail, we must rail against the impotence of gun control legislation and the acceptance of a culture of violence. We must remember. This Christmas, we must sing the Coventry Carol.  

 Matthew quotes the prophet Jeremiah in his report of the ancient slaughter of the innocents: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” A voice is now heard in Newtown , and we must refuse to be comforted. Bye, bye, lully, lullay.