Forgiveness means refusing to make someone pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation and opportunity but now you forgo the consolation of inflicting the same on them...It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death.

-Tim Keller, The Reason for God

and may the odds be ever in your favor

I don't know what it is about The Hunger Games. I just can't shake it from the place where it has landed deep inside my thoughts. When I'm easing down from the day, sorting through what has happened in the time since my head lifted from a wrinkled pillowcase, I continually return to the raw mental space that holds Katniss Everdeen and District 12 in some gritty version of a futuristic America. It's not a grinding, anxious space but similar to a malleable, clay-like object that I continually turn over and flatten in my palm in a rhythmic way, only partly aware the I'm trying to give familiarity to it's form. And that it's killing me. Something of the same feeling when you're sitting catty corner from that women in the restaurant who should be a stranger but, perplexingly, is not at all. Somehow, you can almost predict her movements and know that she's kind and has a brother. You've seen her before. Where was it? You know her. How?

It's something about the chilling Effie Trinket in her shocking pastels on that dusty stage. It's the dull but frantic mental terrain of a young girl, hardened far before her time. It's the fear inside each colorless dress and boot and button up shirt standing in those long, sloppy lines as they wait for their name not to be called--dear god, save me--by someone whose has forgotten that they have a soul. It's wild power in the face of a stale and dry hopelessness. A cooped up privileged few so blinded by the color of their shoe laces and eye lashes that they pay no mind to unspeakable crimes happening in the very place they call home.

It would not be so captivating--so deeply horrifying--if I did not know that these things have happened and are happening now. And don't these things always happen while a comfortable minority sits on the sidelines cooking broccoli and shopping for cereal? It's not in the face of full, naked awareness that droves of innocent people are subjected to brutality but when those who can help--who can bring clarity to muddied disaster--decide not to. Right? It is, in the end, an unwillingness to engage in difficult, sprawling devastation. Fear becomes--through some twisted mental decision--a happy, embarrassing ignorance; transforms it's owner into an obnoxious, pitiful Effie Trinket teetering on silly heels before a crowd of drooping gazes and pallid complexions. The microphone is directed towards our mouth and still--through fear, through ignorance, through an unfathomable selfishness--we fail to see the young, the poor, the hopeless, the unborn silently screaming for justice as we happily call their names for a cruelty that we mistake for brief entertainment.

update : for instance, this unspeakable.

the kendalls come to denver