January 3, 2010
Last Sunday ended with a crushing blow. When it was dawn in Michigan the sun was setting in Phnom Penh. We were about to go out to dinner. And we received word of the suicide of Bryan Shelly. The world stopped.
So this Sunday an entire rural community reverberates with love and grief. The memorial for Bryan is at 1 pm in the high school gym. It is full. My whole congregation sits and sings together. We are following the guidance of Bryan’s parents, Mark and Kim, who want “something good to come out of this tragedy.” We hear of the beauty and belovedness of Bryan’s life. The gentleness and courage of his parents. His best friend, Ben, plays music on the piano and shares slides and film to honor his friend’s life.
Dave DeCou, the respected English teacher quotes the poem “No Man is an Island” by John Donne:
“Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
There was no loud gong ringing in Marcellus this day. But there was an empty thud that sounded. It was the echo left in the space, the life, that Bryan left behind.
We are all diminished by the death of Bryan Shelly. So young. Talented. Full of promise. At the center of the senior class of seventy students at Marcellus High School. Yet in a hidden way we will never fully know, captured by depression and despair.
How is it that in one week such a tragedy seems to bring the hearts of this little community into full compassion and care? Vibrancy, hearts fully alive with love and grief, every parents fear, every student’s nightmare, is alive in this gym.
It is like Christmas. Are we only capable of being seasonally awake? Or will this great tragedy indeed continue to vibrate into something more? A deeper hope.
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