Shedding Light: A Reflection Amid Darkness

Guest blogger Sarah Rosenberg shares her thoughts about the Newtown, Conn., shootings and how to talk about it with her daughter

Originally published on: wp.com

Filed in: current events & culture

(Photo Credit: John Moore/Getty Images, published on The Detroit News website)

by Sarah Rosenberg

Last week, I heard about a man who killed his mother and then went to an elementary school and killed 27 people he didn’t even know and then killed himself. Without any more detail than that, this story is gruesome and inexplicable, and no amount of detail can make it any less so.

I had an immediate response to hearing this news, and this response has stuck with me. I thought, “That man must have had no connection to any love in his life because no person who could feel love in any form could perform such acts and end his own life in the process.” This was a person whom life had failed.

That idea sat with me for a very long time, the idea of a person who could feel no love anywhere in his life, which isn’t the same as a person who had not had access to love in his life, but rather someone who was completely disconnected from love, the source of all that is life.

Very quickly, responses around me turned to horror and fear, anger and accusations. I found myself avoiding words of torment and rage and gravitating towards those of hope and embrace. A post on facebook from a friend who was quoting Fred Rogers’ “Look for the Helpers” anchored me.

Outpourings of love and gratitude came from all corners and strengthened me. I sat with these things and listened.

The details of the news story were macerated all around me. Twenty children between the ages of 4 and 10 were killed. I thought of my own daughter, still in the middle of her school day, unaffected by this news, surrounded by love and the daily normalcies of her eight-year-old experience. I love her beyond the bounds of my own existence. I would do anything in my power to protect her.

Then it dawned on me: I do not have the power to protect her from this world. I don’t even have the power to protect myself from this world. How will I explain these events to her? How will I console her when she has fears?

“while we cannot choose how we will die,
we can choose how we will live,
and it is in this choice where all of our power lies.”

My thoughts returned to this man with no connection to love in his life, and my power became instantaneously available to me. None of us will survive this bodily life, nor will we be given the choice as to how our exit will manifest. But while we cannot choose how we will die, we can choose how we will live, and it is in this choice where all of our power lies.

Here was a young man whose life and the lives of others ended because he could not absorb love. He had no connection to anything good in life. His soul longed for a tether to life, and it couldn’t find one. Here was a man who was completely lost. But what if there had been love in his life? A gesture, a smile, a hug? And not just one, or even a light dusting over his twenty years, but a daily onslaught of love coming from people, strangers, folks he passed on the street, people at work, anyone, everyone? Just a single smile, but from everyone, always? What would this whole world be like with those things?

I knew what I would say to my daughter when I picked her up from school.

“I would tell her that love is the only gift that keeps on giving, the only currency that you can spend more than once, the only nourishment that will make you feel full even when there is emptiness all around you.”

I would tell her that each of us has a life, and that each of our lives is born of love. We are fashioned from the fabric woven from infinite threads of light and love and beauty, majesty and grace. We strengthen that fabric when we live in gratitude and respect, when we bask in the light of our beings and project that light onto all that we come into contact with. I would tell her that love is the only gift that keeps on giving, the only currency that you can spend more than once, the only nourishment that will make you feel full even when there is emptiness all around you. I would tell her to feel gratitude for what she has, to offer smiles freely, to hug and to kiss and to tell those she loves with her words and with her actions and to love everyone she meets because we are all the same when it comes to love. I would tell her that if she spent her life giving love, people would watch her and would learn from her, even when she didn’t know anyone could see her, and that she would spread her love just by living in it.

I would tell her that, if she made giving love a priority in her life, at the end of every day, she would go to sleep knowing she did her best and shone her light on this world. I would tell her that if she lived her life like this, she would have nothing to fear because in her life she would have grounded and surrounded herself with love, and on that last day, all we have left is how we have lived our lives.

I do not know what the future holds for me or for her. I cannot protect her from pain or tragedy or death however it may come. But I do know what the present holds, and if I live each moment giving love, and if I show my child how to shine her light on her life, it will be enough. ❏



Sarah Rosenberg is a logophile and a dogophile, a picker, a grinner, a lover and a sinner. Sarah lives with and for her eight-year-old daughter and her menagerie of animals who share her home and her heart. She is an avid appreciatrix of yoga, world cultures, small things, the beauty in the everyday, and the regular teachings of her own child, some of which can be found at “speak like a child” on Facebook.

(editor’s note: this shooting occurred in the region where I grew up, and many longtime friends were affected by this tragedy. please consider giving to a charity that serves the area, joining the Newtown United Facebook Group or finding out more about the “26 Acts” movement.)

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