On Thinking the Unthinkable

There are things too big to confront, and yet we must confront them anyway

Today is December 28th, which the Catholic Church celebrates as the Feast of the Holy Innocents. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this feast day over the years; it commemorates an event for which we have no historical evidence, and for all its faults, the Church is generally pretty good at following the historical consensus with respect to things like saints who probably didn’t exist or whose “martyrdoms” were just blood libel, having done a big “spring cleaning” of the Roman Calendar in 1969 and slipped St. Christopher into an optional memorial rather than a major feast (and “Little St. Hugh” was never canonized at all). But the memorial of the Massacre of the Innocents remains on the calendar, and that alone makes it worth thinking about. The most common form of memorial kept on that day in the United States is to pray for children who were aborted. Readers will not be surprised to learn that I think this has narrowed our vision of the feast.

Last year I wrote a piece for Outreach that tried to expand on this somewhat. I think that the approach that I outline at the start of that piece is fundamentally correct: the death of a martyr is a conformation of their life to the life of Christ, because in dying for him they resemble him who died for us. The role of Christ is played by the martyr here: as on Good Friday, we who observe the feast play the part of the crowd who killed them. So, without denying the popular observance of Holy Innocents, I think that its place in American conservative Catholicism risks warping its role as a feast of martyrs. If you are a conservative Christian in America it is very easy to think about all those horrible people who allow abortions to happen or who administer them or who help their wives or girlfriends get an abortion. But martyrdoms aren’t about what some nebulous set of other people did: they’re about us, about what we do, about the ways we stood in the crowd at the Crucifixion and at the death of the martyr. Holy Innocents is about confronting the ways we kill children.

And this year it’s especially significant, because every one of us in America is participating, however unwillingly, in the slaughter of children in Gaza. As of Christmas Eve over 8,000 children living in Gaza had been killed by the Israeli army. It would not surprise me if this were the day that the number reached 10,000. The government which claims to act on our behalf, funded by our taxes, is buying weapons from American arms manufacturers and sending them to Israel and supplying cash aid that can and will be used to pay more soldiers to kill more children. These are incontrovertible facts whose moral implications we need to confront.

For me, full confrontation with these facts is impossible. The evil being done to the people of Gaza and to the Palestinian people as a whole has already sunk depths from which our reasoning intelligence flees in horror. This refusal is rational and good, because to fully understand a thing is in some sense to take it into ourselves, and so we cannot fully grasp such evil without doing irreparable damage to our humanity. At the same time, however, we cannot refuse to confront it, both because it is being done in our names as Americans and because justice demands right proportion, and right proportion entails a full account.

I think different people find different ways into being able to do this. Synecdoche and metonymy are the usual avenues for most of us: wrap our heads around some part and let it stand for the whole, or take a symbol of what is happening and confront that, knowing it masks something greater and worse to which we must address ourselves. My own first recourse when faced with something unspeakable, something with depths that can’t be spoken whether for good or for ill, is always to music. And the Feast of the Holy Innocents carries with it an English carol that, I think, allows us a place to start.

The Coventry Carol is sometimes included in Christmas collections, which is extremely weird because it is not at all a Christmas carol, not even by festive winter association. The text dates at least from the 1500s, and takes the form of a lullaby—indeed, the text contains both the etymological roots of that word. What makes it so shocking and is that the lullaby is being sung by the mothers of the dead children. The melody is strange, archaic, but definitely in a minor key. The death of children is alien to most 21st century Americans; it was not at all alien to the 16th century people of Coventry. But they also knew, as we would do well to remember, that what is most important about death is the survivors. It is the mothers whose words we hear, whose grief is at the center of this song. Another arrangement is below:

This is the lullaby as memorial, both of the children and of their mothers. The arrangement is fully strophic: the identical melodic and harmonic structure in every verse turns the song into something cyclical. The music becomes a gateway into the text, an invitation to enter into the grief of people long gone. It recognizes that grief is also cyclical, both on the individual and the social level: we return to the things we mourn, and we are always faced with new occasions for mourning.

This music, then, is a way of entering into the mystery of a grief that we ourselves do not face but must nonetheless acknowledge and confront. I use “mystery” here in the theological sense: not something that must not and should not be inquired about, but something that always escapes our complete understanding. To enter in is not to claim it as our own but to allow it to surround us. It is knowing not through comprehension but through immersion. This is the way of knowing that music makes easier, perhaps because our sensory experience of music is primarily of being surrounded or engulfed by it, not of being able to take it fully into ourselves. It is the difference between the way an experienced fisherman knows one small lake and the way an experienced sailor knows the ocean.

I don’t write this as a private therapeutic; I write it because we have a positive duty to confront what is happening so that we can act to end it. Mute incomprehension is a normal and healthy response, but it is not a useful one. The moral response to atrocities is to cry for them to stop, to do what we can to make them stop. We were not called forth from nothing to be mere witnesses and chroniclers of suffering. God entered the suffering of the world, the nightmare of human evil, in order to bring it to an end. God promises to wipe away every tear; we cannot aspire to that. But entering into the grief surrounding the deaths of children must be part of our own resolve to do God’s work however it must be done. Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum.