You make yourself another macchiato and open YouTube. Some scrolling and a few reels later you come across impact statements from those affected by the 2022 Buffalo Shooting. A playlist begins and and you keep watching. Why exactly, who knows. Macabre interest, melodrama. Perhaps guilt for not knowing which shooting it is, though you can’t be blamed entirely. Relatives and friends of the victims addressing the shooter with eloquent restraint— articulations of grief, some purple, others downright breathtaking in their honesty, expressed through sobs and swears, condemnation, long punctuations of silence. They think they understand the motive, although they’re unable to comprehend exactly how it drove the shooter to kill.
There are customers here now, two middle-aged men, businessmen. You could tell they were businessmen because they were talkers, and they did not stop. They must know each other prior to this meeting, perhaps being introduced by a mutual friend, or maybe they go back, way back even. Either way they’re comfortable with each other. One of them is talking about his recent trip to Tanzania, where he and his wife went on safari. The other man looks at photos on his phone, his eyes grow wide and he nods. It sounds like he spent his time glaring through the viewfinder of a camera instead of a rifle. After all, snapshot is originally a hunting term.
“Human beings cannot help but look at things. Without concentration and focus, the flood of images leads to distraction and despair,” reads an article on Catholic Iconography. Hell isn’t painful as much as it is overstimulating and overwhelming.
Images are most effective when they are communicated simply and clearly, something Catholic images balance while being ornate and reverential. Know the meaning: you can ascribe it to the image of the cross, anything you’d like. Hope is the return, at the cost of faith— faith being an integral component of sustaining the human spirit. Security in the absence of answers, something which most are unaccustomed to today as answers are provided almost instantaneously— the investment of your suspended beliefs and to lower the boil on your simmering mind; accept and be accepted. Faith is the antidote to death as it pushes against the finality of it.
Christ was immune to death: he died and rose again and lives forever, and you can too in the Kingdom of Heaven, which you always understood it to be that God got locked out of Heaven, the gates closed behind him and he misplaced the key, and had to go around back— being born in the flesh as the Son of God and living into adulthood to then be crucified and die and rise again- and open the gate from the inside, letting everyone in.
There are mornings when you open the cafe and find the door was unlocked all night. You’re not surprised to find no one inside. The customers, those who wander and are lost, start to straggle in around midday. People usually come to work remotely. The businessmen pay and leave are soon replaced by Espresso-Tonic guy (as you’ve come to know him) who analyzes spreadsheets in gym shorts and a t-shirt.
The common end for all living things is death. It is the ultimate unknowable, completely intangible until one is in it. All we have are the residuals, the ripples and aftershocks, to base it off of. We are blind men feeling up an elephant. Man is ultimately a spiritual creature and has an end in a material sense but his spiritual end is supernatural.
The concern of the Church (which claims to exists for the sole purpose of the salvation of souls) following the death of the pope is handling its administration and finances, which are taken over by the Camerlengo, a cardinal appointed by the pope to oversee management of the property and revenues of the Holy See. But what of the true meaning of a pope’s death? That a mortal, someone from the earth at this time in it’s history and in the story of humans, will be coming forth to be the liaison with God. How many priests do you think when a new pope gets elected can’t help but think or take on a “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss” view, especially those older ones of the modern age, although the pope’s don’t work like presidents, your friend who believes in being directed by the church towards the highest good, which he (and they) claim is God, which is happiness, conflicting ideas to say the least, no the papacy really isn’t quite like anything else. You can’t really live through multiple pontificates. If 2025 is to be the last year of Francis’ pontificate, it would be a collective 47 years between the last three popes, so given the global average age of 30, most have seen only one pope serve completely.
The Bible is made by man for man, which is why it is a story, made up of many voices, though Christians claim it to be the Word of God. Our conscious minds operate on a sequential basis. We need to know what’s gonna happen next, always. Even those who claim they don’t those who like to go with the flow, have some reasonable expectation of what’s to come, a if this happens then that will happen based on experience or some knowledge prior, knowledge, insubstantial weight that we think can save us but ultimately means nothing. That’s why happily ever after has such appeal. It’s an open-ended ending, although the story goes on. It just ends for you. What is death if not the ending of a fairy tale? Is it as beautiful and horrible as any you’ve read?
Soon Espresso-Tonic guy is gone and you’re alone with Mr. Glass, who ambled in a while ago and lurks by the bar near the back of the cafe. He asks for a decaf Americano on your way out and when you passed him you see he’s reading the Gabriel García Márquez Wikipedia page.