We have to try.

A horrific hate crime has gone down and Captain Olivia Benson desperately needs a reliable witness to help her team track down the perpetrators.

Instead she gets Anne. A young woman who is agoraphobic, and has not left her Greenwich Village apartment in five years, but who sits at her window at night, watching and listening to the streets below, and one particular night, witnesses two men beat a young immigrant, Javier, almost to death while screaming homophobic slurs.

Anne’s apartment is a work of art – a gorgeous mural, in colors that speak of joy and beauty, covers one wall, and the tiny space is tastefully decorated, with lovely wall hangings and candles set just so all around. It’s sanctuary, really, Anne’s refuge from a world that she says is daily more cruel – “I see all I need to see from that window.”

Olivia needs Anne. She tells her so, talks about how Javier is in critical condition and how she wants to bring his attackers to justice. Anne asks her what’s the point. There’s just more and more. It will happen again.

Olivia knows this. She’s known it for 25 years. Has seen the absolute worst of humanity do the absolute worst things. She knows how awful it is, how it seems to be getting worse. And still…. We have to try, she tells Anne. We cannot look away from the horror. We have to try.

We have to try. We cannot look away.

****

In the faith tradition that has raised me, it is Holy Week – the days Christians (of all kinds, from all places) mark the days between Palm Sunday and Easter. My pastor reminded me last week that thirty percent of what we know as “the Gospels” in the New Testament happen during this week. It’s a lot. Triumph, betrayal, death, despair, and, ultimately, on the other side of the darkness of grief and pain…somehow and beautifully, joy.

It’s super easy to want to skip to the joy. Because. man, we do not like the discomfort what comes before it. And I’m not just talking about skipping Maundy Thursday and Good Friday so we can revel in Easter.

Look, I get it. Sadness, loss, broken hearts, deep grief – these things all just suck. Mightily. But there’s a reason those comedy and tragedy masks always hang together in a theatre studio – you cannot have one without the other. Joy and grief exist on opposite sides of the same coin that is our hearts. To be fully human is to know them both, and to make every effort to look away from the things that hurt is to shortchange healing.

Y’all, we cannot look away from the pain of the world. We cannot ignore the civilians dying in Gaza, the missing men, women and children in Israel, the innocents at the border of the US and Mexico, the ways gun violence is destroying this country, the reality that democracy is, truly, at a crisis point, the truth that it is harder than it should be for someone working full time in the United States to stay afloat financially…I could go on. And on.

And we cannot look away, either, from the pain in our own lives – lost dreams and broken relationships and terrifying diagnoses. All of it is enough to make any one of us want to retreat into a shelter of our own making and find there whatever safety we can muster.

But we simply cannot.

I’m not suggesting we dwell entirely on the negative, the dark and sad, every day. Not at all. There’s hope and grace aplenty in this world, and more often than not we find it right next to the things tearing us apart. But that hope and grace don’t mean near as much if we have not also lived days where both seem impossible.

It’s hard, y’all, I know to acknowledge how awful things can be. It’s hard to take a real look – inside us and all around us and face whatever demons, whatever griefs, are to be found there. It’s depressing and anxiety producing and overwhelming to read the NYT headlines of a morning and recognize all the places in the world where evil seems to be winning the day.

And also…

The White Witch couldn’t stop Aslan after all.

And Voldemort was no match for the goodness of Hogwarts.

And Tony Stark’s heart was more powerful than anyone realized just when it mattered most.

And the Rebel Alliance won.

Good Friday does not last forever. It did not then and it does not now.

And if this is true – and my love of the stories mentioned above, and actual history, and, most of all, my faith, tell me that it is, in fact, true – then the right and proper response is to live as if it’s true, even when we cannot summon the courage to believe it. And that means, we cannot turn away.

We have to try to make a difference in the face of it all.

It’s the only way.