There will be no more death”
or mourning or crying or pain,
for the old order of things has passed away.” Revelation 21:4
That week there were parents in Moore, Oklahoma, who didn’t sleep because their children, their darling school-age children, were trapped somewhere in what little was left of the school where on Tuesday morning, when the bell rang, they’d been sitting in their desks, innocent as doves.
What those moms and dads were going through that night is beyond imagination. They couldn’t dig through the rubble themselves because only search-and-rescue people could. All the while, those parents knew the death toll was rising, and no one, right then, had a clear idea where that toll would stop. They could do nothing, absolutely nothing, but cry and pray in a home that must have seemed horrifically empty, as it turned out to be.
And God didn’t appear to be helping either. Rain was forecast that next morning, lightning and thunder, even hail. Nothing destructive. On what was left of the streets of Moore, Oklahoma, there was nothing but ruin. Rain wasn’t what the searchers needed, nor was it what their kids needed if, by some miracle, they were still alive beneath walls that were no longer walls.
We’ve got kids in Oklahoma. They’re no longer kids, really, but, for a parent, I suppose, they will forever be kids – mine. They made it through a horrendous weather week in the Sooner state.
Friends called us, concerned. We could tell them, joyfully, that our kids were untouched, if anyone in the region can be “untouched” by what happened. People knew the elements were conspiring to create a killer cocktail. If you live in Oklahoma, you live with tornadoes.
Here, on my way to my grandchildren’s school program that night, I got a call from my mother’s pastor, who told me that my mother could use a call from her son because she was deeply concerned – quite emotional – about her grandchildren in Oklahoma. She’d been watching TV.
I hadn’t even thought of Mom. So I called her. She’s 94. She was worried sick, she said – a heavy dose of all that grief and sadness crept like a storm into her apartment. How could she help not thinking of her grandchildren?
Regardless of when you’re reading this, what’s beyond doubt is that more disasters, more death, has occurred since a mile-wide tornado ripped an Oklahoma City suburb into shreds in late May, 2013. To all but residents of Moore, what happened this week may well have been forgotten in the storm of tragedies that seem to be our lot as human beings, some of them self-inflicted, others acts of God.
Most everyone I know has a 9/11 story. Those two digits and the slash between them trigger images nearly universal in this country, if not elsewhere. Auschwitz is less a word than screen of images playing horrors before your eyes. Whole sections of hurricane-ravaged New Orleans have yet to be rebuilt.
On Christmas, 1984, Mother Teresa stood on the streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, totally overwhelmed by the poverty – “I have never seen so much suffering,” she wrote to Father van der Peet. This woman, who had lived her life among the poorest of the poor, claimed what she’d seen that day, the day of the birth of Jesus, was what she called “an open Calvary,” a place where “the Passion of Christ was being relived in the bodies of crowds & crowds of people” (308).
An open Calvary.
I don’t doubt for a moment that’s what she would have seen in the faces of those parents of lost children in Moore, Oklahoma, this week, another “open Calvary,” in the anxiety and then grief of moms and dads whose sweet kids never left Plaza Towers Elementary School, kids who that first night would have still been there – if they weren’t already with the Lord.
Some say it was the biggest tornado ever. A couple dozen people died in that storm, several of them children.
I’d like to say those kids belong to all of us, but they don’t. Mine are safe.
Theirs are part of an open Calvary all of us have seen at one time or another in our lives, but most of us will never forget.
God, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.
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