complaint field

Three years ago a Quaker named Free told me about a Quaker conference he loved and called it F-Crap. I joined FCRP for $15.00 a year to listen to Jungian giants like Joseph Campbell on MP3 recordings. I hoped to be able to attend one day. I thought I’d like to go, but I never had the time and never had a compelling reason to go.

This year, even though the funds I could have used went elsewhere, I felt like I had to go. The something else canceled and the funds were returned, so I went easier. The unstoppable reason was that early childhood loss aid was invisible to a man named Charles Carl Roberts IV. His motive, according to Amish Grace and his suicide note, was that he couldn’t get over the grief after losing a baby nine years earlier.

In a way it is a gauntlet. A glove thrown as a challenge. No one had responded to that challenge to minister to people with dying and aborted babies. Not enough is said or done. What most people don’t realize because they can’t see the heart is how hard it is to deal with.

I was where Roberts was two years before he shot 11 people, except maybe worse because my hormones were out of whack. There are not enough books or programs that help people who lose babies and have miscarriages with little or no ministry. Find miscarriage in the Jewish Bible or the Christian Bible. Perhaps the Koran has more?

So why is FCRP connected to Roberts? Annville is next to Lancaster County. So why am I connected to Lancaster County? Because Liphart is a family name and they lived there for over 200 years and the public buildings are called Liphart and I knew the same sadness that Charles Carl Roberts IV needed healing but didn’t get it so he acted out his grievance with almost all the violence of his pain. To find out what else he could have done, you need to read Amish Grace.

Alan Briskin, PhD, was the speaker at this year’s FCRP. He is the author of Soul Stirring in the Workplace. He spoke about changing camps on the last day of the conference. This could have somehow happened with this man at school.

I spoke to an informal group that included Briskin on day two about violence in the world by men. One man asked, “Why blame only men?” and I replied that you can’t stop domestic violence by building more shelters. Later I remembered Herb Wagemaker, MD, who wrote Taming Oedipus: Why Are Children So Violent? Also at a Moravian conference I attended in Winston Salem, NC, studies from the University of Minnesota show that domestic violence doesn’t improve when women become more like servants. (vaw.umn.edu/) Finding out how women impact violence needs further study.

The book Taming Oedipus is about boys and focuses on the now familiar school shootings by men. The University of Minnesota studies on domestic violence focus on domestic violence primarily by men. Blaming men has nothing to do with the overwhelming statistics that men commit most of the violence. It is rare to find women killing everyone in their families. Even with drugs, female violence does not increase substantially. The mother’s instinct suffers and the males who are dedicated to drugs have no one to stop them.

Which brings me back to the grievance and the change of camp. I tried to talk to the group about my complaint and I did it indirectly by considering that the ego came from one side. All the sorrow and pain that hurts most deeply comes from one side through something called glare.

I talked about this pain coming from the side in an emotional voice. What I couldn’t say was that I was there because Annville is next to Lancaster County, where 11 people were shot in the head because someone lost a baby. He never heard my voice. And if he had known me, the grievance camp would have joined us, so instead of going there to shoot, he could have planted a rosebush that day, or he could have reached out to someone else who was hurting. I would have had half the pain instead of the full weight of losing a child.

Before going to FCRP, I finished reading Amish Grace. I went to Annville and was only able to tell a few people what had brought me to FCRP. I was connected somehow, but being silently connected doesn’t seem to be enough. My silence didn’t change the field before the schoolhouse shooting, and it didn’t change the pain afterward.

The glove is dropped. The complaint field is ready for a field change. People need to talk about the pain of losing a baby at any stage or connect in a meaningful way that brings more love and coping skills to people who may be disabled and broken in ways that are hard to tell.