The infant Jesus has a full head of wavy hair in this icon, The Virgin of Vladimir. There’s a faithful recreation of it in the book I bring with me when I travel. The book is Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons by Henry J.M. Nouwen. My priest gave it to me during a time where verbal prayer aggravated my scrupulosity. The fact that it’s a gift from him makes the book an icon for me in itself, in addition to being a container of icons, and a guide on how to see them better.
Beside my new husband, looking at this icon in the Hilton Garden Inn in Chattanooga, I’ve never noticed how the Virgin’s cloak—a bright red in other versions I’ve seen—is deep crimson here, so deep it is almost black. The skin of her hand is a deeper shade of brown than her face because the tempera has been scratched off except for one remaining chip that gilds her finger like a ring. With her hand, Nouwen writes, she is creating a space for us to come and adore Christ. But she is not forcing us too. She’s merely opening her arms.
The son presses his face against her cheek. His head looks especially small in proportion to his thick neck. This is no accident on the artist’s part, Nouwen explains. The neck represents the Holy Spirit, the breath of God.
Mike and I have been married for just over four months. This is our second road trip together, and though the occasion for our Wisconsin trip is somber, we are happy, deliriously happy to be traveling together. We eat crab legs in Milwaukee, watch the Cardinals beat the Giants in St. Louis, meet Sue the largest complete tyrannosaurus rex skeleton at the Field Museum in Chicago, inhale the ash wood and sawdust at the Louisville Slugger Factory. We listen to “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” in the car between stops, talking about how on our next road trip, we’ll visit all the places Lucinda Williams mentions in that album. Lake Charles, Nacogdoches, Jackson, Baton Rouge…on and on until we reach the end of the world.
We eat breakfast at a restaurant called Whitebird. I order poached eggs on fresh sourdough with sautéed mushrooms. I like it so much I consider ordering a second helping. Mike orders sausage and bacon—that’s all. He says it tastes just fine.
Having laid his grandmother to rest beside her husband in King, Wisconsin, we are driving back home to Florida, stopping in as many cities and visiting as many Civil War sights as possible. Our next stop is the battlefield at Lookout Mountain. The winding drive up is green and glorious. I think of Walt Whitman’s poem “1861,” about the first shots of the war at Fort Sumter. He personifies the year, envisioning him as a soldier coasting southward along the Tennessee River, standing “at Chattanooga on the mountain top.” I figure he’s probably talking about mountaintops like this one.
Even Mike, who overall has found Chattanooga underwhelming, is stunned by the view from Lookout Mountain, the sight of the battle above the clouds. Some of the best views you’ll see in America, he says. And he’s been all over.
Plaques across the field immortalize regiments on both sides of the fight. Old pieces of artillery jut out over the steep ledge, pointing at the mist rising above the river. There’s a massive columnar monument in the center, dedicated to the prospect that the union will never be split again.
On our way to the Ocmulgee mounds in Georgia, my younger brother Henry texts our family group chat that Charlie Kirk has been shot at an outdoor event in Utah. The bullet struck his neck. His condition is unknown. People who watched the video claim in the comments section that the shot was unsurvivable.
I’d only been familiar with Kirk’s content on a casual basis, but it was through voices like his that I came to accept and embrace my natural conservative leanings. This was no small feat given that I was on a college campus where the overwhelming majority believed gender to be a matter of personal preference. I would commute to school listening to The Andrew Klavan Show, even submitting questions to his mailbag from time to time, finding quiet comfort knowing there were others like me somewhere, saying what I lacked the boldness to say.
Mike has never heard of Charlie Kirk, so I explain: He is the founder of Turning Point USA, an organization dedicated to combating campus woke-ism like the kind I encountered at school in New York. Being twelve years my senior, Mike did not encounter this phenomenon during his college years. And even if it was around, he wouldn’t have noticed, intent as he was to finish his degree in Information Systems, graduate early, and get to work.
“Sounds like he was poking the hornet’s nest,” Mike says of Charlie Kirk.
Immediately I’m angry, hearing my husband’s comment as callous and cold, even blaming. Mike is very matter-of-fact in his speech, and it’s easy for me to assume there is cruelty behind his words, even when there isn’t. Later in the day, I came to understand that it was not cruelty at all but basic mathematics that led Mike to make that remark. It was pure observation: Speaking out in a high risk setting renders catastrophe more likely. Poking the hornet’s nest can get you stung. And he wasn’t wrong, and he wasn’t cold.
I refuse to watch the video of the shooting, but I still feel sick refreshing the news feed a hundred times over. The comments make me uneasy. We are a nation at war but their side is the only one fighting, they read. We’re a nation on the brink. Neutrality is not an option.
The mounds here in Georgia are staggering monuments to the dead—much taller and more pronounced than the Effigy Mounds in Iowa. They are the great relics, the signs explain, of the lost Mississippian culture. Mike and I explore the greenery, holding hands, when a woman with a portable oxygen machine comes up the narrow trail. She pants, “Sorry I’m going to have to split you two,” and squeezes between us to get by. In an attempt to match her folksiness, I say “That’s alright, we’ve seen plenty of each other lately.”
The scrupulosity sets in for having said it, especially in light of the misdirected anger I’m harboring from our conversation before. I’m worried my comment either came across as cold or like a tactless innuendo. I’ll apologize to Mike for saying it later in the car. He won’t even remember what I’m referring to.
Charlie Kirk has a pulse, the rumors spread. Urgent requests for prayers flood the Internet. He is alive and fighting, one post says. Join us in prayer.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on Charlie Kirk, I pray. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy—but Charlie Kirk is dead within the hour, dead from a shot in his neck. The president himself makes the official announcement.
This is no accident, I hear Nouwen’s words again in my head. The neck represents the Holy Spirit. The breath of God.
Back in the car with Mike, approaching the Florida border, I’m looking at pictures of Charlie Kirk on my phone. He is staggeringly tall, taller than I ever realized, with a celebratory fist in the air. Reading his Wikipedia page, which has now been changed to past tense, I am reminded of a story I first read in middle school: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” The story is set in the late twenty-first century, in a dystopian America where the authorities have taken it upon themselves to ensure no person is better than another, be it in athleticism, intelligence, or beauty. The strong citizens get weighed down with bags of bird shot. The attentive citizens are intermittently bombarded with hideous sounds through tiny radios in their ears. The most beautiful faces are concealed by hideous masks.
But it’s the title character, Harrison Bergeron—exceptionally tall, handsome, brilliant and outspoken—who is shackled most heavily. At the end of the story he breaks through the shackles, and as punishment he is shot down on live TV: a warning to whoever tries to pull a similar stunt. Or at least, it would be a warning, if the viewers’ memories weren’t instantly blasted away by the ear radio’s next awful sound.
Returning home on any other evening, I might have noticed the gold leaf edges of the icons on the shelf smoldering from the sun through the window. I might have recalled the collective groan on the airplane arriving in Rockford, Illinois by people who weren’t ready for their vacation to end, and I might have felt grateful to live in Florida, a place where no one groans upon returning and everyone hates to leave. I might have returned my copy of Nouwen’s book of icons to the shelf, the cedar wood home altar my husband built for me as a wedding present. And I might have heard my priest’s voice in my head reminding me that the altar—not the screen—is the true control center of the universe.
But instead I am scrolling and refreshing, scrolling and refreshing, Google searching Charlie Kirk’s assassin, Charlie Kirk’s family, Charlie Kirk’s wedding…as if detaching from my phone would make me like George and Hazel Bergeron, forgetting everything that had just happened, retaining only a vague sense of some deep, deep sadness. I don’t realize that in all my scrolling and searching, I am falling into another form of forgetfulness, numbness, and deafness.
So when I get into bed with my phone still in hand, with the news still cycling, it takes me several moments to hear my husband say my name gently.
“What?” I answer.
“It’s time to put it down. Come back.”
Image Credit: Lookout Mountain via Flickr.
