I’ve been struggling with writer’s block lately. I’ve only been posting about sewing and reading because those things are easy to write about. How did I make this thing? I can tell you. What did I think of this book? I’ll let you know.

The other things on my mind are much harder to articulate.

Sunday passed with news of the two newest mass shootings, one of which appeared to racially motivated. (I say appeared because I have not gone back down the rabbit hole of news articles related to the shootings since I read two initial NPR articles).

I felt like I couldn’t just post as usual the next day, but what could I say or do? I wanted to load my kids in our truck and drive down to Washington, D.C. I wanted us sit as close to the White House lawn as they would let us and remain in silent protest until someone DID something.

Of course, all the logistical aspects of that plan came crowding in immediately after the initial idea. Where would we sleep? Bathe? Eat? How could we afford to live on the fly, paying for parking and eating out?

I looked online to see if there were any protests in my city. Our city has had protests in the past for other shootings and over the separations at the detention centers, but there was radio silence when I looked for events related to these recent shootings.

Was everyone on vacation? Had they given up on ever seeing meaningful change?

I read a book while I was in the Cayman Islands the week before last, Rachel Held Evans’ Searching for Sunday. Just as I finished it, at the airport in Grand Cayman waiting for our flight back to the U.S., I picked up my next read, The Universal Christ, by Richard Rohr.

Evans started to lift the top off my head, and Rohr finished blowing it off.

The gospel presented in the two books was the hopeful one I have always looked for. It didn’t engender fear or present like an exclusive club. I wasn’t sure how to talk about it because I know the ideas are heretical to many Christians.

Then I read this passage in Rohr’s The Universal Christ:

God creates the pullback too, ‘hiding his face’ as it was called by so many mystics and Scriptures. God creates a vacuum that God alone can fill. Then God waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill the space in us, which has now grown even more spacious and receptive. This is the central theme of darkness, necessary doubt, or what the mystics call ‘God withdrawing his love.’ They knew that what feels like suffering, depression, uselessness – moments when God has withdrawn – these moments are often deep acts of trust and invitation to intimacy on God’s part. (That this is so poorly understood was revealed when the world was shocked to discover that Mother Theresa had many years of darkness and what looked to the secular world like depression. It was anything but.) -Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ

I’ve dealt with cyclical depression since my college years. As I’ve gotten older, the dark times have gotten reliably longer and deeper. Rohr’s interpretation of this experience resonated with me in a way that shook me to my core.

The idea that my dark periods were God inviting me into relationship made sense and provided a much more hopeful framework for my experience than the one I had been using.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this God who operates in and through relationship, as I process the mass shootings. I’m looking for ways to understand what is happening in the U.S. and what is being asked of me on an individual level when I’m at a time in my life when I often succumb to feeling helpless and alone.

I wondered if the darkness we see in our world today is a relational opportunity on a grander scale. Could God be using the heartbreak and hatred we see around us to invite us collectively to step forward into the depths of Love?

When I see another shooting reported in the news, or a reminder that the detention camps are still open, or another example of institutional racism, the feeling washes over me again. That I am just one person, and so much is wrong. The reminder that I will never be enough.

I’m picturing a world where a lot of people feel that way. As they see the darkness around and before them, they walk forward into the void that has been created. A whole society of hurting individuals allowing God to draw them in. Then, maybe with that collective closeness to the Divine, we would be able to find a way forward that is better than the way we’ve found so far.

The photo is from George Town, Grand Cayman not long before sunset.