The people of Humboldt offer us all a lesson in grace.
De Souza, A11
Through eyes blurry with tears the entire nation has watched the people of Humboldt respond to the deaths of their men, their fathers and sons, their brothers and husbands, their friends and teammates. In the face of immense suffering and loss, how they have responded has been a lesson in grace.
I watched — online at 2:30 a.m., as I am overseas, also with teary eyes — the memorial service at the hockey arena. And the people of Humboldt got it right. It was beautiful in a painful way, and taught us that pain and beauty sometimes go together. That’s why there are paintings of Jesus in the agony of crucifixion.
Humboldt knew that grieving death is not a political event, and so political leaders were welcome but took a secondary place. There is a terrible temptation to read human tragedy through the lens of politics or public policy. And so I salute the prime minister, who did the right thing by attending, and did even better by sitting at the back and not saying anything.
I don’t doubt that he would have been eloquent. But when we need to express the deepest aches of the heart, and answer the most profound questions, it is not to our political leaders that we ought to turn. Politics is part of who we are, but not the sum of who we are, and on such occasions we need to put our priorities in order.
It was more important that Don Cherry was there. Hockey comprises a large part of our national history and culture and, despite his excesses — or perhaps because of them — Grapes singularly gives expression to that. The response in Humboldt was about our culture, not our politics, and Don Cherry is a cultural figure, not a political one.
Cherry lives in my parish during the summertime, and has visited my church. He knows better than anyone else the centrality of the hockey rink to our culture, but he also knows that the house of the Lord is more important than even the rink. On Sunday night, the Humboldt arena was the house of the Lord for that grieving community.
I wasn’t surprised that my colleague Christie Blatchford knew where to find the story in Humboldt. She went to the local Catholic parish, St. Augustine’s, where the Sunday Mass was offered for the Broncos. Those closest to the injured and dead came forward so that the congregation could pray for them.
“Yes, it is painful and tragic, but it is also a moment of grace,” concluded the pastor, Father Joseph Salihu.
“They know grace here,” Blatchford wrote. Yes, these days of such deep sorrow have been days of grace.
They know grace in Humboldt. And grace was with the team chaplain, Pastor Sean Brandow of the Humboldt Bible Church, who spoke so powerfully on Sunday evening. We preachers sometimes speak of being anointed. There are occasional moments when we are preaching that the words are not our own. Pastor Brandow was anointed on Sunday night.
“All I saw was darkness, fear and confusion,” he began. He had come across the scene soon after the crash. He was at the hospital with the dead.
“I received thousands of texts,” Brandow said. “We needed those. We needed to hear those things, that support ... Four times in the last 48 hours, in the midst of all the darkness, four people sent me passages of scripture. I had understood the support of people, and I needed that. Families need to hear that people support you, that people love you and are praying.”
“But when it was so dark, I needed to hear from God,” he continued. “Four words from God were bigger than a thousand words from any human being.”
“I fear no evil because you are with me,” he quoted from Psalm 23, so often read at funerals. And that answer is the only answer that Christians have at such moments: you are with me.
At the conclusion of his powerful preaching, through his own tears, Pastor Brandow spoke of the scars on the body of Jesus, risen from the dead.
The Gospels insist upon it. The Christian tradition, it might be said, even glories in it. God has scars. Even after the resurrection, the scars remain. Scars come from wounds. They testify to the wounds, even after healed. And the Christian puts his faith in the God who counts Himself among the wounded, the suffering, the dead. The God who has scars.
The wounds are still fresh in Humboldt. The scars will come in time, Pastor Brandow, told us. And the scars that will come have already appeared in history. God has them.
They know the wounds in Humboldt. They will know the scars. They know grace.