Aja Gerrity
Aja Gerrity, a sweet, kind, smart, funny, talented, seventeen year old girl died yesterday in a car accident. Aja was a client of mine. She was headed to NY to go to college for her love of music and performing arts.
Aja was driving the car and three other people in Aja’s car died. All were recent graduates of Ridgefield High. I did not know the other kids but if they were friends of Aja they must have been terrific kids. Amand Williams, 18, of Ridgefield, Jason Cary Carter, 18, of Vancouver, and Richard Michael Araiza, 18, also died. Dustin Evan Leitzell, 18, from Ridgefield, was transported by LifeFlight to Legacy Emanuel Hospital in critical condition.
The van’s driver, Ki Young Kim, was transported by ambulance to St. John’s Hospital in Longview, Wash., with serious injuries.
How do you explain such tragedy?
This was posted
on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 and is filed in the General categories.
August 17th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
This accident and its attendant horror and suffering is one of the vicissitudes of an unpredictable physical universe. Some people would attempt to explain it by wrapping it in a religious mantle, saying “God called her and her friends home.” Not so.
God is spirit, not to be infused into the physical universe. Those who place God in such situations run the risk of diminishing both the identity and function of God in our hyper-frenetic world. God is separate from, not part of, physicality. As the scripture espoused by most of these who would bring God into the argument says: “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” (Here “he” and “him” are general pronouns referring to all humanity.)
God’s function, when we call upon him, is to comfort us in our spirits; to provide balm for healing in our hearts; to link us in love with those who share our grief, our suffering, and our bewilderment that such a thing could happen.
Aja was a beautiful young woman, on the cusp of discovery. Her friends, like she, were beautiful young people. I wept when I read their account, because they represent some of the best of what was to come.
How could God take such beautiful young people? He did not. They were the victims of a physical world to which we are all bound by laws that are not predictable and cannot be rescinded.
God, the giver of spiritual gifts, provides comfort, in spite of those physical bonds, in contradistinction to those unyielding and merciless judgments that come when inexperience, misjudgment or error lead to violation of physical law.
His judgments are just, merciful, comforting and filled with benevolent hope. Indifference reigns in the physical world, and its consequences are incontrovertible. Gods’ antidote is apprehended only on the spiritual level, and it is there we must ultimately go to realize its consummation.
The witness he leaves within each of us calls us to him in moments of grief, anguish and loss. But it is a small voice, and we must still our anxieties to hear it. Once we give it ear, God is lavish with his comfort, his reassurance, and his promise that his presence will always be there, a limitless reservoir of love and blessing for simply the asking.
We love you Aja, even though we never knew you. Yours is the light of generations. Manda, Ritchie and Jason, dwell with God. If we could epitomize youthful vigor, innocence and kindness, it would be with such as you were and are.