Marcie Ratliff/Winonan

It’s a little surreal to be editing a weekly newspaper in Winona and watching live updates of a bombing in Boston.

It’s more surreal that the bombing terrorized runners and spectators alike at the Boston Marathon, which for many runners is the zenith of their running careers.

Legs that were running, blown off.

Throats that were cheering, choked in sobs.

“Here cracks a noble heart,” as Shakespeare writes. “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” as Yeats writes. “Jesus wept,” as John writes.

It seems tragedy underwrites even the least heroic, the most quotidian, of stories.

Freaks populate the globe, do they not? From Newtown, Conn. to Pyongyang, North Korea, to Boston, Mass., terrorists pull at the strings of the world, heedless of where the puppet goes. Or, worse, entirely delighted.

Street bombings are, of course, everyday occurrences for some cities in the world. No less horrific, they can be counted on to wreak havoc on society, regardless of whether that society is growing or dying.

Grim, yes. I’m always a little jolted by violence—real or fabricated. I hate that the world is forever victim and victor, always in a contest, and that the rest of us are left to sort it out.

I think part of being alive is hating stuff like this. Part of being human is sympathy, sorrow that the world is sick enough, that random violence happens, that law seems unable to stop people, that people seem unable to stop themselves.

But I have a hard time accepting, as the Transcendentalists of the 1850s did, that humans are inherently good. There is no “rest of us,” for we all play both parts, victim and victor.

G. K. Chesterton famously replied the following to a newspaper report seeking to know what is wrong with the world: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton.”

Not willing to throw in your lot with the troublemakers? The Catholic Chesterton has been praised for his Zen-like wisdom and humility. The religions agree on this, at least: it seems that if we’re all going to be on one level, it’s going to be the bottom one.

Not to say that humans are doomed to utter hopelessness. Your worldview will attempt to speak into this labyrinth. The cloak of assumptions you wear as a human being in this mess will get you part of the way.

Locating myself as a Christ-follower, I’m caught here in the middle too. I am indeed the problem, and I only become part of the solution when I accept my brokenness as brokenness and put on Christ, whose perfection covers my imperfection.

Who did Jesus hang out with? The losers. The hated. Even the haters, as long as they were sincere. Hello, hope for the flotsam and jetsam of society, those whose actions don’t match their words, those whose cheese will not stay on their crackers. (Me).

Jesus comes into the picture and does a new thing. He still does, with millions of lives.

People still explode other people. Incidents like this remind me that we still need rescuing, and in the only tale where the hero dies for the villain, we can indeed be rescued.

So, I weep that the world’s heart is cracked like this. I rejoice in the hope that already an Artist is making beauty out of the pieces, asks us to jump in and join him.

I am not, but I know I AM.

Contact Marcie at [email protected]