The last time I entered a church was the night of September 11, 2001. I'm not a believer and neither was my partner. We went anyway. We needed to be away from the television hammering our brains with electron flashes of fire and death. We needed to not be alone with that any more.
The church passed out small white candles to everyone who came. We all lit them, one candle to another, and held the flame in our hands in gathering dark and grieved for thousands dead. Tried to understand a hatred without limit, erupting out of another universe, a place of evisceration and burning and screams.
The night after George Tiller's murder I came to a church again. The partner who went with me the last time isn't with me anymore. Now she's my friend. She is a physician, and she has performed abortions, and she has worked with people who knew Dr. Tiller. After what happened to him, she wants to do abortions again.
I was thinking of her, my partner of long ago, when the minister tonight gave me a small white candle and all of us in attendance lit the candles one to another. I saw a possible future day. A service to hold candles in memory of someone I love.
And then I remembered that it could be any of us, in that church. That night. In Knoxville, Tennessee last year, a man went into a Unitarian Universalist Church with a shotgun and killed two people, bloodied six more. He said he wanted to destroy "the foot-soldiers" of liberalism.
In memory of George Tiller, I sat in a church with soldiers. Men with long gray pony-tails and Birkenstocks; soccer moms in tank tops and shorts; teenagers in black t-shirts spackled with kaleidoscope gobbledygook; school-marm women with hair in buns and Little House on the Prairie dresses; college students wearing the school colors; babies on a hip or a knee of father or mother. From a universe made of nightmares a man with a shotgun would come to murder them all.
They sat in oncoming twilight beneath rafters lost high overhead, surrounded by walls of plain white plaster, beneath a carven image of the Nazarene on the cross of the ancient stories. I don't believe those stories. I don't know if I believe in any redemption of any kind, ever. But I want to. I sat with these strangers, holding my little white candle. And we listened.
Speakers at the pulpit from not one faith but many. Two women read the names of people slaughtered for working at abortion clinics. Lit more candles in their memory. After each name, the onlookers recited: she will be greatly missed; he will be greatly missed. Ending with Dr. Tiller: George will be greatly missed. More speakers, then. Jewish, Christian. After a while I lost the particulars of the words. Lost myself in brows tightened around me, heads low, little white candles held trembling in dimness to the words. I sensed the language now more than heard. As if the meaning came from some other place.
A tall man in a black suit and silver shock of hair rose to speak. Black eyes stared out from a face lost in shadows and ash. He was a physician, he said. George Tiller had been his friend. I don't remember the man's name. He spoke of his friend's honor and decency. Trying to help women be safe and healthy and free. And then his voice broke and he stopped. Just stopped. He looked at the sky beyond the rafters and a whisper like dying came from his lips. Oh, George, he said.
He sat down. Candlelight and quiet and tears. Then more words of remembrance. Pledges we make at an ending. Never forget. Not in vain. Justice and peace. Let us go forth. The church became an island. A haven in spaces made of words and silence and tiny flickering light. Apart from creation and time. Strangers next to me like friends. Alone together with angels. Former things passed away.
I forgot that people could be like that. Just love. Communion. Nothing else. For a while, at least. In ending and loss.
Afterward I went outside. Back to time and space. Traffic rushing by in fading light of the sun. No day without the night. No words without silence. No serenity without blood and the breaking of bone. Until the day comes out of myth when history is at an end and time shall be no more.
The man in the White House enjoins us to seek common ground. Better angels. Malice toward none. So too did another lawyer from Illinois, before a gunshot smashed his brain, five days after the stillness at Appomattox.
One hundred forty four spring times gone away since. Words erupting again like fire, from those who believe their backs to a wall, the ways they cherish passing from the world, their prophecies of the end coming true, beast slouching toward them at last. In hidden places they draw plans against the enemy. And they ready their guns.
History comes again like night.