On my desktop as I write this post is Joel Auerbach’s heart-rending photograph of grieving parents, taken after the school shooting in Florida on Ash Wednesday. A work laden with so many layers and depths of meaning etches itself into the consciousness of millions. It goes beyond news photography and into the realm of art.
Screen shot: Parents wait for news after reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2018. (AP Photo/Joel Auerbach)
What hit me like a blow to the heart was the grey cross on the forehead of the woman at the centre. When I first saw it, the cross traced on my own forehead was still distinct, created from the ashy remains of palm fronds from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. It was drawn by the priest that morning at the penitential service that, for a Christian, marks the beginning of Lent. Welcome February sun was pouring through a window, and the day promised to be good.
Yet it is unsettling when Ash Wednesday collides with a Valentine’s Day. We enter a season of fasting, penitence, and soul-searching in the midst of chocolate excess and shallow sentiment. The martyred Christian who gave his name to this frivolity has long been forgotten, his memory buried in romantic clichés.
Auerbach’s photograph slices through the froth of hearts and flowers that are more a product of commerce than love. It takes us into the gray landscape of the Cross itself, where Christians believe that Jesus gave up his earthly life so that evil might be forever conquered. How do we explain then, this present evil that lays waste to youth and innocence and courage? How do we explain the greater evil that enables such an atrocity, not once or twice, but over and over again?
Questions like these are the tempering flames of both the outward journey of faith and the inward quest for understanding. The stalwart Christian will face them head on, demanding answers from the God who claims to be Love. Those demands will at times be angry, even blasphemous and profane. An Anglican priest, the late Michael Mayne, called this “dancing in the dark” in his book Learning to Dance. “It is the hardest dance,” he wrote, “and many are defeated by it.”
The anguish of the women in Auerbach’s photograph breaks my heart. These are sisters in Christ, sisters in suffering to every feeling human being. The hard lesson of this world is that love and pain go hand in hand. This is the price of human freedom, to accept or reject the will of God, that will which is Love. Even harder is the teaching that we not only share in the grief of evil’s victims, but in responsibility for the evil act itself. The killer is also one of us and demands our love.
Like Michael Mayne and others before me, I have learned many times “that suffering, when permeated by love, can have creative power.” He goes on to say that the spirit in which Jesus faced death “challenged the darkness and turned the destructive power of evil into good.” Sometimes faith can move mountains, and sometimes a photograph can move enough human hearts to defeat evil. I am praying for this to be one of them.