Welcome to The Light, your quiet hour of reflection.
In Oregon, a community is holding its breath and its grief together. Nearly four hundred thousand dollars has been raised to support the father who intervened during a school shooting in Bend, stopping a teenage gunman who had already taken the lives of three children and a teacher. That a community would turn so swiftly toward the one who carried the unbearable weight of that moment speaks to something tender in us still.
Across the ocean, in Ecuador, mourners gathered to honor a priest who died when a large crucifix fell from a wall and struck him during a livestreamed mass. The image is difficult to sit with — a man of faith, mid-worship, undone by the very symbol he served beneath. There are no clean meanings here, only the strange, sorrowful proximity of devotion and loss.
And back in the United States, Mike Huckabee, the ambassador to Israel, suggested publicly that Tucker Carlson may be demonically possessed, citing his criticism of Israel and the war in Iran. When we reach for the language of possession to explain disagreement, we might ask what that says about the limits of our own theological imagination.
That is this hour's reflection. Carry the light gently.
