It’s hard to make sense out of what happened last weekend. Nineteen-year-olds aren’t supposed to die.

We learned last week that a few months back two black holes, each many times larger than our own sun, collided, emitting a gravitational wave that traveled across galaxies and bent space-time itself. That wave, caused by the collision of two impossibly massive objects, registered as a mere blip on some very sensitive instruments here in Louisiana. None of us noticed.  And yet a single human life, one that was just starting to exert its own force on the universe, has sent a devastating ripple through our community. That’s what happens when we love one another, when we share our lives and hopes and dreams with each other. We become vulnerable. We hurt.

When tragedy strikes, people often turn to faith for answers. There’s no logic to what happened this weekend, so we look to super-rational deities for answers. All the world’s major religions grapple with suffering at their core. The Hebrew Scriptures tell us of God’s chosen people, a people constantly wandering, homeless, persecuted, enslaved. Buddhism teaches us how to escape suffering’s grip. And Christianity has as its central figure a God who is unjustly tortured and killed. Religion doesn’t explain pain, doesn’t justify God’s seeming indifference to our plight.  Instead these faith traditions radically reconfigure suffering as blessing. It’s the suffering that reminds those of us left to mourn that we are still alive and that we can never stop looking out for one another.

I didn’t know Kyra Koman. Yet some of you reading this did know her, and all of us are affected by her loss, if only because we are left facing our own fragility, our own weakness, the truth of our own suffering.

That will be hard for some of you to process in the coming days and weeks, and I want to encourage all of you to reach out to someone who can help you process what you’re feeling. You may be angry, you may be sad, you may be anxious: all of these are reasonable responses to an unreasonable situation, and no one expects you to process those feelings alone. Dr. Bourque and her staff and my team in mission and ministry are ready to talk with you about your grief, your confusion, your anger. Don’t try to tough this out.  I have an appointment with my therapist this week, and it can’t get here fast enough.

So I won’t take the easy way out and tell you that God has a plan. If God has one, I certainly don’t know what it is. But I do know that we’re never alone in these moments of suffering. God suffers too, and in that suffering we can find comfort, and if not in God then at least in one another. So let’s take care of each other. Let’s love each other. Let’s support each other. There are a lot of forces in the universe that we can’t control. But we can always be present to one another and make holy for one another the suffering that is our common lot.

Let me close with a Hebrew prayer shared with me by Dr. Yavneh Klos that reminds us that God is with us in our living and in our dying:

Eternal master, who reigned
supreme, 

Before all of creation was drawn;

When it was finished according to his will,

Then “King” his name was proclaimed to be.

When this our world shall be no more,

In majesty he still shall reign,

And he was, and he is,

And he will be in glory.

Alone is he, there is no second,

Without division or ally;

Without beginning, without end,

To him is the power and sovereignty.

He is my God, my living redeemer,

Rock of my affliction in time of trouble;

He is my banner and refuge,

Filling my cup the day I call.

Into his hand I commit my spirit

When I sleep, and I awake,

And with my spirit, my body,

The Lord is with me, I will not fear.