Like a Shepherd

Handel's Messiah is one of my favorite recordings of all time. My preferred performance is that of the English Concert Choir, directed by Trevor Pinnock. It is by far the most moving journey of music and Scripture the world knows, and Pinnock's masterful direction coaxes every last drop of meaning and sensitivity out of it that I can possibly imagine.

I have been realizing that my response to visiting Rwanda is very much like an onion, peeling through my unwitting defenses, layer after layer. As I wrote in the post about seeing the hotel where the movie "Hotel Rwanda" took place, day by day I am discovering how the reality of the untold suffering is seeping upward from my subconscious into my emotions and thinking.

This afternoon I was in the car, listening to the Messiah, as the alto sang:

He shall feed His flock like a shepherd:

and He shall gather the lambs with His arm,

and carry them in His bosom,

and gently lead those that are with young;

Come unto Him, all ye that labour and are heavy laden,

and He will give you rest.

Take His yoke upon you, and learn of Him,

for He is meek and lowly of heart,

and ye shall find rest unto your soul.

When I got to the part about "gently lead those that are with young," I suddenly thought of piteous mothers in Rwanda, forced to watch while their babies and children are chopped to bits. We walked through a large section in the genocide memorial museum in Kigali where pictures of children were shown, with their names, ages, personality description, and then how they were murdered. It was so horrific that some of our group members literally jumped when they read certain gruesome descriptions. It makes the Psalmist's comment about "dashing their little ones' heads against the rocks" sound tame by comparison.

So when I heard that my Shepherd tenderly leads mothers of little ones, the incongruity of it opened me up to the pain and I wept. I could not stop. I drove along, digging for kleenex in the glove box and allowing myself to cry and understand why I was crying. I wasn't crying for me. I also had to tell myself that I wasn't being selfish or weird to cry for someone else's pain. I used to think that to cry for a pain that I myself didn't experience would be to try to steal that person's honored grief away from them that really belonged to them. But now I allowed myself to weep over the horror of little children treated like cockroaches to be smashed. Allowed myself to shudder and cry, to mourn for the mothers like "Rachel, who is weeping for her children, because they are no more."

I started watching Hotel Rwanda again on Friday, and I already cried twice in the first 30 minutes. Tonight I will try to watch the rest, stop shielding myself, and I will let the tears come if they want to come. This is a different kind of experience than anything I have ever known. This is a combination of profound personal experience, physical closeness to carnage, and vocational calling back into the scene of the crime. Knowing that I will go back there, with the attachment that I feel, is far more powerful than looking back on a place that I visited, that was interesting, but isn't a place where I will go deep with the participants.

Rwanda is all the more raw than the Nazi story (which I thought nobody could possibly top, and in other ways you still can't) for a few reasons. 1) it all happened out in the open, none of it was hidden in any way, as opposed to the secret death camps. 2) it was unopposed. 3) there was absolutely no place to hide and most civilians were not helping anyone. 4) the killing wasn't just perpetrated by soldiers - it was done by neighbors everywhere. Not just the odd betrayal, but betrayal as standard and widesweeping. 5) it wasn't about getting rid of people as cleanly as possible. It was about destroying people as brutally and painfully as possible, and the bodies were left strewn and piled everywhere, for months and months.

Today I got an email from another Californian woman who has been living in Rwanda for 4 years. She said that one way she knew she was called back to Rwanda was that she "could not stop weeping" all the time after returning home. Finally the Lord spoke to her. "Why not move back there?" And she did it - sold everything and moved, not even knowing what she'd really do until she got there. In 4 years she's only been back to the U.S. 3 times.

Today a friend, Beth, came over to catch up on our respective adventures. She wept several times as I told my story... and as we prayed together before she left, Beth wept openly, thanking the Lord for giving me a love for people I don't even know, and asking God to hurry and open the doors to send me back.

So, I am taking the Lord's yoke and learning of Him, for He is meek... In my Catholic church sanctuary, we have a side altar of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He holds out His heart, which is on fire with love, and encircled with thorns. In Latin under the portrait it says "Discite a Me" - Learn of Me.