As I’ve pondered the week’s events, it seems a recent theme here has been resilience… from Josh’s story to the Easter story to the storied history of the Boston Marathon, I am amazed by what a blessing resilience can be.
I remember years ago reading excerpts from Rabbi Kushner’s bestseller, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” And while I still don’t always understand the “why,” I am amazed at how many good things immediately seem to succeed the bad. It’s the rainbow after the storm… the sunrise after the midnight… and the rose that blooms after the thorn.
Will we wallow in our negativity? Will we get lost in dire circumstances? Or will we persevere — growing from that which has only left a scar, but not an open wound?
I borrow now from Kevin Cullen, an articulate writer from the Boston Globe, poignantly sharing a few thoughts this week, after the Boston Marathon was run once again…
… A year after a pair of refugees who spurned all the opportunity offered to them by this country allegedly attacked the Marathon, a refugee who embraced what they rejected triumphantly won it. It was a poignant reminder that the vast majority of immigrants who come to America aspire to be Meb Keflezighi, not Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Last Patriots Day, Dr. Ricky Kue, the son of immigrants, was working the Alpha tent next to the Boston Public Library, around the corner from the finish line, when he heard two distinctive booms. Kue, an emergency room physician at Boston Medical Center and a major in the US Army Reserve, found himself in an almost surreal hospital theater, treating in Back Bay the sort of injuries he saw in Iraq years before.
On Monday, Dr. Kue was working the Bravo tent, on St. James Avenue. For much of the day, he was almost bored, and it was a beautiful thing to behold.
At other times, he got a little busy. There were a couple of runners with chest pain. “I tried to reassure them, telling them they had just passed the hardest stress test of all,” he said.
Some runners were profoundly dehydrated. But he didn’t see lives destroyed. He saw and heard what he always saw and heard before last year.
“A couple of times, I stepped out of the tent and I saw all the runners, all these families, with kids, just walking, relaxed and happy, and it was just like I remembered it,” he said. “It was just so . . . normal.”
This year’s Marathon took place on Easter Monday, a day replete with symbolism in Boston and beyond. There is no day on the Christian calendar more attached to the idea of redemption, rebirth, and resurrection than Easter.
On Easter Monday in 1916, a group of ragtag rebels marched down the main drag in Dublin and took over the General Post Office, launching a quixotic rebellion that eventually led to Irish freedom. People died on the main street in Dublin all those years ago, just as they died on the main street of Boston last year.
The poet William Butler Yeats was alternately appalled and awed by what transpired on Easter Monday 98 years ago, leading him to write “Easter 1916,” a meditation on the pain and suffering and death that gave birth to something Yeats called a terrible beauty.
What happened last year on Boylston Street was terrible. People were killed and maimed, bodies and souls grievously injured. And yet when the sounds of the bombs faded, when the smoke lifted, what followed was beautiful, more powerful than a bomb. Police officers, firefighters, EMTs, and paramedics and ordinary people ran headlong to help the wounded, without any regard for their own well-being. They tied off legs. They comforted the traumatized. They moved 90 seriously injured people in less than a half hour.
Everyone who was stabilized by marvelous medical people like Ricky Kue and transported to the hospital that terrible day was saved. More than one was brought back from the dead.
Reborn. Resurrected.
On Monday, Easter Monday, we had our own Easter Rising.
Back to being normal.
Back to being Boston.
And it was terribly beautiful.
Well said… what resilient people… the beauty and blessing after the storm.
Respectfully…
AR