In September 2015 Anne and I were in St. Andrews for my biannual residential study week, when the story of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, drowned while fleeing Isis-ravaged Syria with his family for the safety of Greece, appeared on the front page of papers across Europe and the UK. Most horrifying was the picture of Alan’s body washed ashore on the beach near Bodrum, Turkey. The story, and the photo, cast a pall over the entire university, if not the entire country, that day. All I remember is being in morning chapel with my colleagues, praying for Alan, his family, and all refugees, and not wanting to do anything the rest of the day but reach out to those we love. I can’t say what the mood was in the States, because I wasn’t here, but I would hope it was the same.

Those memories came flooding back this week, with the story from my own hometown of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his infant daughter Valeria, drowned in the Rio Grande River trying to get to America in order to ask for asylum. You can see the photo of Alan here, and of Oscar and Valeria here. I warn you, they are profoundly disturbing, which is why I have not posted them directly. However, they should disturb us, and we should look at them, over and over again.

Unfortunately, the reaction to this most recent tragedy has not been quite so noble. Instead, we have politicians from both parties pointing fingers across the aisle. Such language is, to me, quite literally, obscene, which is rooted in the Latin obscanenus, “ill-omened.” Using such a tragedy to make political points, to exonerate one’s self and blame others, does not bode well for the future of the republic.

We would do better to turn to W. B. Yeats, the greatest poet in English in the Twentieth Century, and his 1928 poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” Taking as its subject the horror of World War One and the brutal conflict between the IRA and the British security forces that followed hard upon the end of the war, Yeats writes of a world that has seemingly gone mad. Two of its more memorable parts:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

Rides upon sleep:  a drunken soldiery

Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

The night can sweat with terror as before

We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

And planned to bring the world under a rule,

Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

And then

But is there any comfort to be found?

Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

What more is there to say?

Weasels fighting in a hole, all the while planning to bring the world under a rule of some so-called “philosophy.” A pretty good description of modern political discourse, I would say. Meanwhile, as Yeats says, what we truly love vanishes, to “come no more. Never, never, never, never never.” (King Lear, V, iii, 308-309.) This is why Lear, when Cordelia dies (a scene so shocking that Dr. Johnson for years could not bear to read it) finds himself unable to speak but only only “howl, howl, howl.” (Lear, V, iii, 258.)

Yeats’ point, of course, is that we are all culpable: at times like these, none of us is better than a weasel in a hole. There is a very long chain that put Alan on that beach in Turkey, and Oscar and Valeria on the banks of the Rio Grande. All of us could have done something that would have helped to break that chain. Jürgen Moltmann, who as much as anyone has helped Christians come to grips with the implications of the Holocaust for the traditional view of an omnipotent and all-loving God, rejects the notion that bystanders can complain about God’s absence in scenes of horror such as these. “Where is God,” he says, is a question for the sufferers to ask. (The answer to that question, says Moltmann, is suffering along with the sufferer.) The question for the rest of us, Moltmann continues, is one not put to God, but by God to us: Where are you in this tragedy? Where were you when this happened? This, he says, is the question he put to Cain: “Where is your brother Abel…what have you done?” “We have to exist in the question,” says Moltmann, “and with it, as with an open wound in our lives.”

Not, where is the Congress, or the President, or the European Parliament? Where are you? Jesus tells us over and over again why we fail, time and again. We literally cannot see the misery around us, cannot hear the cries of the suffering. The priest and the Levite pass by the other side of the road, so as not to be troubled by the sight of the suffering, nearly dead, traveler. (Luke 10:25 ff.)   Dives the wealthy man literally could not see the beggar Lazarus starving at his gate, dogs licking his sores. (Luke 16:19 ff.) Indeed Jesus tells us “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8.) Jesus doesn’t say, “call an ambulance” or “donate to Save the Children.” He tells us to do something ourselves. Feed someone, clothe them, house them. This is why we need to look at the pictures, over and over again.

So, as Yeats asks, where is comfort to be found? Perhaps it is in the fact that, time and again, we are given the opportunity to see things as they really are. Here’s what Alan’s aunt said about the photo of her nephew lying drowned on the beach: “It was something about that picture, God put the light on that picture to wake up the world.” Sleeper awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” (Ephesians 5:14.) The hope that, sooner or later, the world might wake up is the comfort to be found. At times, however, it seems small comfort indeed.