“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.”
That was the headline on the website of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, the national public broadcaster in the Republic of Ireland, on September 11. What the candidate in the U.S. presidential debate the night before had said in full was:
In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.[1]
As I’m sure you know, in the twelve days since the debate, the people of Springfield, Ohio, have been through hell. They’ve been put under a media microscope; white supremacists have marched through the town; there are have been more than 30 bomb threats against schools and public buildings.
Today is the first Sunday in November which means that instead of the normal sequence of lessons for Ordinary Time, we are given the option of reading the lessons for All Saints Day, which falls every year on November 1. So today we heard a reading from the Wisdom of Solomon (a part of the apocrypha in which we hear that the righteous are in the hand of God), a psalm reminding us that the saints pledge themselves to truth rather than falsehood, a bit of the Book of Revelation describing the “new Jerusalem” where God will make God’s home with the saints, and (oddly enough) to the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel.
It had gone on so long she couldn’t remember a time that wasn’t like this. She lived in constant fear. She wasn’t just cranky and out-of-sorts; she was terrified. Her life wasn’t just messy and disordered; it was perilous, precarious, seriously even savagely so. It was physically and spiritually draining, like being whipped every day.
