Perhaps it is this mundane event from my own life that makes my heart hurt for the mother of the 4-year-old who recently fell into a gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo. The internet has gone wild, blaming the mother for the horrific tragedy and the death of the gorilla. The boy is too young to blame - he couldn't know better. The zoo is also to blame, because their safety measures should have been better. Everywhere you look, the response to this awful event is blame blame blame, and shame shame shame. Never mind that the exhibit had gone 38 years (since its opening) with no incident and is inspected annually, or that the mother told the kid it was not safe to go in just in moments before he did, or that every single parent who has ever lived with a determined child can tell you a story about when they lost sight of their child, even though they intentionally were watching (it takes as long as to blow your nose, or get a drink of water, or sneeze twice to lose sight of a quick and determined child). Despite all this, the overwhelming response has been, "Who can we blame for this unspeakable tragedy?" - and then to do it.
It's perfectly natural to respond to tragedy that way. It's a very human response to any sort of fear or grief. As a pastor, I hear a lot from people grappling with why things are happening the way they are. Why did my loved one have to die now, in this way? How could God allow this? Why did this have to happen? Why did Jesus save so many people from death in the Bible, but not my loved one? Am I being punished? Does God hate me? Then maybe, finally, we get to, "This gorilla didn't have to die, and here's why. It's the fault of _____. If that person/those people had done something different, this wouldn't have happened."And then, we can find some rest, because we figured it out.
It's a horrible spiral to head down, but we still do it because we think (consciously or not) that in order to move on from tragedy, we need some resolution. And when that tragedy doesn't affect us in an acute way, it sometimes works. Sure, we are all still heartbroken, and maybe enraged, that an endangered gorilla had to be killed to save the boy's life. But as long as we have made sense of it, and told the internet our opinion of what caused it, we can file it away in our "Now it Makes Sense" file. We have gained control of the situation, and so we can move on.
Well, at least those of us who are not directly affected by the tragedy can. But what about the boy, undoubtedly traumatized by the event? What about the mother, also traumatized (can you imagine watching this unfold with your own young child?)? What about the zoo, bearing the criticism of the world for responding the way they did in the best interest of a human life? Does our blaming and shaming help them at all? Do we think that our criticism of the mother is the reason she will never go anywhere without holding her son's hand tightly at all times? Is it our astute observations about safety that will cause the zoo to re-evaluate their enclosure's safety measures? Is our piling shame upon the boy and his mother the reason the boy will fear all animals for years to come, endure crushing guilt, not trust adults, retreat into himself, cling to his mother, or reject her, or who knows what else? No, I suspect those things would have happened regardless of our neat, blaming organization of this event. For those aware of the vitriol being spewed their way, I suspect the blaming will make it all much, much worse. It certainly won't make it better.
Thing is, we cannot make sense of tragedy. To do so may bring temporary relief, but in the end will only makes things worse - by trivializing them or by giving someone undue weight of the burden (either ourselves or someone else), or any number of other ways. The only way to get through tragedy is just that: to get through it. Not over it, or around it, but through it. It is the much harder road, but it is the only road that leads to life.
What role do we have, then, as the society around the people most affected by the tragedy? Brene Brown has done some wonderful work describing empathy, in contrast to blame or even sympathy. This video is a great, short, description of her work:
In short, empathy, which fuels connection rather than disconnection, is listening and letting people feel, without trying to explain anything or even make people feel better. It is not to place blame. It is to sit together in the tragedy, in whatever way that can happen. In this case, it is recalling your own stories when you felt like a failure of a parent, when your child slipped away in mere seconds, and then realizing, before you throw stones, that it could happen to anyone. It is recognizing that this is unbearably sad, and it is sad any way you cut it, so instead of pointing fingers and removing ourselves, let's sit in that sadness together. It is recognizing that we are all human, and we all make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes have unbearably tragic endings (and just because none of your mistakes have ended tragically, doesn't mean someone else is a worse person).
Can we as a community commit to walking that road? It is an uncertain road, one that winds around and often doesn't make sense while you are walking it. It is a road that does not offer instant gratification, or the ability to move on with life straight away. But it is also a road that leads to connection with one another, and so also compassion, kindness, and depth of understanding for one another. It is a road that leads to forgiveness. And in the midst of tragedy that makes us think only of death and loss, this is a road that can finally lead us to life - life in and with one another.
