Not long ago, I was glad I did not go to the marathon. The TV camera showed a building I worked in 20 years ago. It did not capture a sea of people cheering runners at the finish line. There were smoky clouds, disembodied screams. When air cleared, there was blood, huddled people with hands clapped to their ears, bodies on the sidewalk. A a leg that had no one attached to it.
For the past few days, I have watched Paris, not for its elegance, not for the Eiffel Tower, but for repeated video of men in black firing impossibly loud assault weapons, executing a man lying on the sidewalk with upraised hands and terrified face. I watched death and hate, but as in Boston, I saw the courage of everyday people who ran toward, not away from Hell, in order to help whom they could.
There is much horror I have missed, although with everything from Ebola to terrorism I know I may yet see it. I have not lived through the plague, been Jewish in German-occupied Europe, grown up during a Great Depression. My father saw combat in war-ravaged Europe when he was 18 years old. He arrived in France not by force, but by choice. He enlisted because he believed it was a war that had to be fought, and he wasn’t willing to see others go while he stayed.
In writing these words, I remember something else—a beautiful scene in a movie my Dad did not live to see, but one he would have recognized even if blind, because it was so lovingly crafted in the spirit of the novels that inspired it.
In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo, the young hobbit whom destiny chose to carry the ring that held the fate of the world, to fall into evil or to have a chance at peace, sits quietly. He talks with Gandalf, the elderly wizard whom he once associated with excitement and adventure and now clings to as the one person who stands between him and an abyss he never saw coming.
He sighs and says that he wished none of this had ever happened, that his life had not changed. His face is taut with the understanding of exactly how much, for how many, is at stake in whether he succeeds in the mission he did not choose.
Gandalf replies “So do all who see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us.”
And that is our challenge, today and tomorrow, and for all the additional days we will live. What do we make of what has been given us, what has happened to us, those things that, for all the love in the world, we cannot change.
I will make of today what I can, and I will try, with my strength, my faith, and others’ help, to make more of tomorrow. That is all we can do, and it is everything we can do.
Love is the only force more powerful than hate or fear, and I know it all over again because in Paris journalists and a doctor poured into magazine offices after the gunshots stopped. I know it because people caught in a supermarket protected those they knew, and in at least one case, people who were strangers. I know it because in Boston people pulled merchandise from store shelves and turned T-shirts into bandages and tourniquets, squatting in the midst of of glass shards and gore and comforted people they had never met. And in all of those cases, the people who came, who helped, did so not knowing if they would die next.
Our race, our religion, our nationality, it is all less than our humanity. If we unite in that, whether we deal with a tired store cashier, tragic illness, terrible crime, or even war, we will make the most of the time that is given to us.