Nohemi Gonzalez in her words:

I am Mexican American and I also happen to be first generation born in the United States.  I grew up in Whittier [California] and had a very hard working mother that raised me to be extremely independent. If I had to describe myself in a few words I would say I am very high spirited, clean, orderly and self driven.

Nohemi was a student of design, studying in a year abroad program at the Strate School of Design in Sèvres, France.  She was nearing completion of her undergraduate degree at California State University at Long Beach.

I know nothing of this young woman but what I have read.  That she was loved fiercely, deeply by her long-time boyfriend. That she was prized and supported in her academic ambitions by her parents and family.  That she was bilingual and proud of her dual citizenship in Mexico and the U.S. That she was effusively on the threshold of starting a family and career.

Nohemi was killed in the Paris tragedy.  One of the 129 who died from being in the wrong place – the place that came into the scope of horrific violence – the systematically random imposition of terror.

She, and those who know and love her will not see her dreams unfold.

This, of course, is tragedy beyond measure.  It is another senseless casualty of fury unleashed through power.  It is a symptom of hatred and suspicion that comes from any system that teaches destruction over dialogue.

How many of us really know how to be in dialogue?  How many of us know how to hold our most fervent values in hand even as we remain in relation with people with different values?  How many of us know how to hold still in that kind of relationship – to hold still and conjure enough curiosity to listen to what the values held by others actually mean to them?  How many of us have the courage to change our stories of those others based on what they say?

NONE OF THIS IS MAGIC and none of it is easy.  Listening is the skill.  It is dignity in practice.  It is also kindness.  It is being willing to learn something that changes our story of another (especially when we immediately fear or hate that person, those people).  Real listening is the antithesis of violence.

And, yes, violence may too easily be deadly.

I can’t know for sure, but the likelihood is high that Nohemi was on the receiving end of bias and other social cruelty because of her race, because of her social class, because of her gender, because of her language, because her parents had immigrated from Mexico before her birth, and because of attributions made to her that only she could know and re-tell. Nohemi’s parents, her beloved, Tim Mraz listened to her.  So did her friends, many of her instructors. But because of cruelly entrenched refusal to listen on the part of ISIS fundamentalists, she is dead.

Yesterday evening I wrote my mentor from graduate school, Jane C. Conoley, the first female president of California State University – Long Beach. I wrote with the most comforting thoughts I could conjure, for the students, for the faculty and staff, for her – a leader I knew from experience would be most kind, most healing – even as her heart, too, was breaking.

She wrote right back:  We are devastated.

Then:  Darkness never overcomes darkness.  Only light!  MLK

In the wake of this wave of unspeakable horror, I trust Jane Conoley. I trust the students at CSU-LB. I trust the presence, the capacity for light in every one of us.  I trust that, as ever, there will be light.  That it will take the form of thoughtful and passionate re-dedication to working for peace.  It will be fueled by our unwillingness to give up.

But for now, there is shock and there is grief.

There is the precious need to lean into each other a bit. To quiet and to listen there.