Holy Innocents

Haven't blogged in a couple of days. Partly this is due to my enormous popularity, which has sucked away enough time that I just haven't been online much. Partly, though, this is because when I've done my blog reading, many of the entries have been about Holy Innocents. Holy Innocents ranks right up with All Saints/All Souls as a Feast Day of Incredibly Inconvenient Timing (on a purely selfish basis, of course). While Holy Innocents has a more specific historical focus than All Saints/All Souls, it usually doesn't take long for the discussion to turn toward modern-day innocents. And regardless of how many other deserving innocents there are to remember in any given year, for me, Holy Innocents is just too close to the anniversary of Emily's memorial service on Dec 27 (and for that matter, Becca's, on I think the 29th). Instead of thinking about Herod and the slaughter of who-knows-how-many young boys (which is itself a horrific story, as Si points out ), or even current events like the tsunami, I think about how a beautiful young woman with a kind heart and a soul that yearned for God was taken from us, shot for no reason. It's compounded somewhat by the fact that the readings for Holy Innocents overlap with the readings from Emily's service, and that particular Revelation passage is hard for me even when it's not Holy Innocents. I mentioned recently how my understanding of the Incarnation was affected when Emily and Julia died; somewhat similarly, my ability to tolerate Holy Innocents has been drastically reduced since Emily's death in particular. I imagine this is something I ought to work on, since this is likely not the last year I'll encounter Holy Innocents, and since my engagement with it will likely have to increase some time. But for now, I'm going to go back to repressing any observance of this particular day.