This is not the sort of thing I usually link to, and I only found it myself through a confusing concatenation of links and recommendations, as one does sometimes: an online advice columnist in an edgy online cultural journal, The Rumpus, extending help to a woman mourning a late-term miscarriage (I clicked through some of the other articles, and they looked to be the sort of garbage that I try to stay away from). But I was riveted and moved by the columnist's harrowing story of her young clients, and how she finally resolved to help them salvage their lives.
It is heartbreaking that the lives of so many are untouched by beauty, or even by kindness. It is heartbreaking that so many children are betrayed. It seems that the young girls Sugar writes about were very fortunate to have encountered her.
Please be warned that Sugar describes painful situations of abuse in some detail, and uses offensive language.
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7 comments:
Thank you. I appreciate Sugar and her stories and advice because she seems to be both honest and hopeful, therefore helpful. And it's good to be reminded of all the people we don't know who need our prayers.
I thought the same thing, GretchenJoanna, about all the people who need our prayers. If only there was some more tangible way to help.
+JMJ+
Sugar's response is so heartbreaking. My own two-year struggle to bring something greater into my own students' lives is such a joke in comparison.
I am reminded of the time I and the rest of the faculty went on a required "immersion" weekend at an Aeta resettlement village. There was a tiny elementary school there with only three rooms: one for the kindergarteners; one for grades one to three; and one for grades four to six. The teachers had to make all their own materials and take care of them carefully because they used the same things year after year. It was another world.
Back in the city, I had just finished screening The Empire Strikes Back for my girls because I wanted them to study an epic that wasn't sword-and-sandals (because city girls are nothing if not easily bored), and I had just come up with a complex essay question for which I was certain nobody could plagiarise an answer from an online source (because I spent too much time googling quesitonable sentences in their assignments as it was) . . . and suddenly all of that seemed so petty.
Here were children so poor that they walked to school barefoot, and teachers so poor that they wore the same uniform year after year so that they wouldn't worry about finding money for clothes. The resettlement village was set up after the children's parents lost their homes to a volcano.
And yet that was simplicity more than poverty; there was still beauty in their lives.
I can't even begin to imagine what Sugar went through with her own girls.
"Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world."
Absolutely heartbreaking.
Sometimes all we can do is pray, but we must trust and hope that these are efficacious. Even a tiny point of light helps to dispel evil and darkness
Hope all is well with you, Pentimento.
The suffering of innocents is something that I will never understand. And yet we must go on loving God in the face of it.
Thanks, Tante Leonie, I am much as ever, but feeling rather uninspired to write much.
Repose-toi bien! (if you will permit me to tutoyer you!)
Merci, Tante Léonie! :)
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