The other day, as I was typing up a blog or movie review or some such, my Plugged In compatriot Adam Holz stumbles into my cubicle, eyes all red. He’d been listening to Taylor Swift’s new song “Ronan,” and he told me exactly what he told all of you in his review.
“This may be the saddest song I’ve ever heard.”
“Ronan” tells the story of a little boy stricken with cancer, a little boy (pictured at right) who died from the disease just days before his fourth birthday. Swift, like thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of people, had followed Ronan’s story as painfully chronicled by his mother, Maya Thompson, on her blog rockstarronan.com. We can’t link to the blog directly because of some language concerns, but profane or not, the blog poignantly traces the joys and pains of living with Ronan and, in the end, watching him go.
Before Adam told me about Swift’s song, I had never heard of Ronan. But now here I am, hurting over the loss of a child I never knew because of a songwriter I’ve never met.
We’re funny creatures, aren’t we?
The way we grieve has been running through my mind a lot lately, in part because of a dialogue sparked by Tuesday’s “Days to Remember” post. It was a pretty simple blog, really—just about how important it is to remember and help those grieving in our midst. But because 9/11 was mentioned at the top of the blog, some readers wondered why we get more worked up over tragedies that take place on native soil than those that happen overseas. As Anon wrote:
Why should this concept prioritize the loss of their lives in my mind over the loss of Japanese or Rwandan lives? In all honesty, this sort of thinking strikes me as distinctly un-Christian. Would Jesus care more about the loss of Jewish lives than Roman? I really, really hope not.
Anon brings up a marvelous and perhaps convicting point—and one I’ve wondered about myself. When the earthquake struck Japan last year or the tsunami rocked southeast Asia in 2009, I was horrified—but I wasn’t impacted as mightily as I was when 9/11 happened. When Rwanda was torn asunder by genocidal violence in 1994, I was appalled that the world didn’t do more to help. It felt deeply wrong, as if the lives in central Africa were somehow not as important as those in central Europe or central Florida. But did I shed a tear for the genocide’s victims? I don’t think I did.
Or, at least, not until I saw Hotel Rwanda, which gave the story a face.
Anon is right: Jesus cares about Romans and Rwandans and Japanese just as much as the Jews. After all, He knows us. He knows our stories by heart—our joys and pains and deepest longings. He understands them better than we do ourselves.
But as much as we might want to, we can’t reach Jesus’ level of empathy and understanding. We’re not capable.
And so, perhaps sadly, we subconsciously create a cup of sorts through which we measure out our mourning. We expend more of our emotional energy on the things we know. We withhold a bit from those we don’t. We feel more strongly for the guy we visit in the hospital than his equally hurting roommate—even though Jesus would love them both equally.
It’s natural, I think, for most of us to still feel the pain of 9/11, particularly on its anniversary. There are lots of reasons for that, but a big one is that it’s more familiar to us. I didn’t know anyone who died in the World Trade Center that day, but I have friends who did. Many of us had visited New York and seen those very towers. Those who hadn’t were familiar with them from movies and television and postcards. To some extent, we knew those towers. They were part of our story—even in the most ancillary of ways.
It’s harder for us to connect with people or situations we don’t know. That’s sad and, maybe as Anon suggests, a little un-Christ-like.
But that, I think, is where our entertainment choices can serve as a surprising boon. While we often talk here about how the movies we watch and the music we listen to can sometimes desensitize us, they can also make us more sensitive.
Hotel Rwanda put a face on a faceless tragedy for me. It brought the horror out of the headlines and gave me a story. It gave me someone to know. And perhaps the connection I felt—the connection that many felt when watching the film—helped make us all more mindful of that corner of the world.
God wants us to care about people—all people—no matter who they are or where they live. They are all precious to Him, and they should be precious to us. And yet we’re made with an innate predilection to care most passionately about those people and places and things we know.
And so what do I think we’re called to do? To know more people. To grow to care about them in the myriad ways open to us. We broaden our worlds through mission trips and vacations, through supporting people who are serving people we’ll never directly meet in places we’ll never personally see.
And we learn about them through our entertainment choices, if we choose well. Our compassion can grow even there, if we let it: We can be moved by Hotel Rwanda. We can be inspired by documentaries like God Grew Tired of Us (about some of the Lost Boys of Sudan). We can be moved to tears when we hear a song about a boy we never knew—a boy who died just days before his fourth birthday.
And maybe—just maybe—those stories and songs will move us to act when we’re given a chance to help someone else … someone we know just a bit better now.
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