Do you ever have
a song pop into your head and get stuck there? Sometimes last week “Mockingbird
Hill” came to me from out of the blue. It had been years, maybe even decades
since I’d heard the song, yet I remembered most of the tune, and fragments of
the lyrics, but only fragments. I thought about looking up who sang it, and
perhaps the lyrics that I couldn’t remember, but hadn’t gotten around to it
when I heard the news of the horrible shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburg. There
are not words to express all that I felt upon hearing the news. I still cannot
find a way to say something about it, yet I feel compelled to do so, of how it
brought back memories of when I felt a similar sadness.
I grew up in a small town in Alabama,
and knew only one Jew, the husband of a dear family friend, so dear that I
always called them Aunt Grace and Uncle Leonard. When I was a teenager we moved
to Montgomery. In the large high school that I attended I made many new
friends, some of them Jewish. One morning, as I walked down the walkway to the
school I was handed a pamphlet, which I stuck in my books without looking at
it. When I took my seat in homeroom, I realized that the girl in front of me
was crying. Our teacher asked if any of us had also gotten the pamphlet, then
walked up and down the rows collecting them before most of us could read them. She
tore the papers as she disposed of them saying “I’ll not have such anti-Semetic
trash in this room.” It was my first exposure to anything of that kind. Why
would someone hate anyone because they were Jewish? It made no sense to me, but
I knew this was very hurtful to my friend in front of me, in a way I couldn’t
imagine.
In 2008 a fatal shooting occurred in
a Tennessee church that I had visited. Until then I had never been concerned
about my safety. In my home church, I sat near the back, across from the doors
leading into the sanctuary. For many months following the shooting, when
someone unknown to me entered those doors, I became anxious, even fearful at
times. Gradually that fear went away, but hearing the recent news has been
unsettling. Even more disturbing has been the suggestion that we need armed
guards at the places where we worship, our sacred spaces. If we are not safe
there, where?
I was thinking about all this when
the song popped into my head again Sunday afternoon. The fragment of the lyric
that I hadn’t remembered until then: "…there’s peace and good will. You’re
welcome as the flowers on Mockingbird Hill.”
Would that it could be so – that we
could make our country a place of peace and good will where people are welcome,
as welcome as the flowers on Mockingbird Hill.
