You, Me, Some Words

I shared these thoughts three years ago, after the twin horrors of mass shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo.  Now, another attack, this one on children gathered for Mass.  I’ll be honest.  I feel embarrassed to offer these words again, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.  May God have mercy on us all for watching and continuing to dig the same hole deeper.

Nineteen of our children, all third-graders, were murdered Tuesday in their Uvalde, Texas, classroom, along with two of our sisters, teachers both. This was 10 days after 10 of our brothers and sisters were murdered in their neighborhood grocery store in Buffalo, New York. The news is heart-breaking, wrenching, horrifying. These are our children. These are our neighbors.

We grieve.

Don’t rush past that two-word paragraph. Take some time with your pain. Step away from the news for a moment and from your commentators of choice and grieve the senseless loss of our children and neighbors.

I also invite you to pray—for the families, for all of us in this national community we share. Pray with tears. Pray with clinched fists. Pray in confusion, fumbling to turn feelings into sentences. Or refuse even to try, if you wish. Silence is its own prayer. But MY hope is that we all “join our hearts in prayer,” as the trope goes, because it’s no trope. Joining our hearts in that holy space beyond place is the beginning of … whatever good can follow.

Two 18-year-olds (boys? men?) decided to kill. One was driven by racist rage born of lies, the other by rage less focused, but both came to the unthinkable conclusion that the murder of innocents was justified. Can you even imagine? Surely, evil is part of the explanation—the evil that twists truth, that twists perceptions and motivations, until hearts and minds and peace shatter. And evil is real in this community of ours, its lies spoken by, well, other neighbors.

I picture our nation as a table—a big table, but a table—flat and let’s say round—and we all live and move on that table.

These are tough days on the table. While all we really have is common ground (I mean there’s just one table), there seems precious little common ground. We choose our sides and claim the great unoccupied center. Differences of opinion become ideological schisms; tensions fester; demagogues pander; and we shout in unison at each other. And anger becomes hatred, and hatred becomes evil, and it’s the broken souls nearest the edge that end up falling, taking innocents with them.

Then grief becomes our common ground. Again.

I claim no profundity, no keen insights, but I believe the cross is somewhere in all this mess. Christ lives, and Christ suffers. He is the light of the world and the man of sorrows. He grieves our children in Uvalde, our sisters and brothers in Buffalo, and our two 18-year-olds lost to lies. I picture Christ and the cross there in that great unoccupied middle of our table. I picture Christ and the cross there on the bleeding edge. And I hear him calling us to himself in both places. Come and love, says the one who loves. And to move toward him on this table of ours is to move toward each other. Dare we hate the one who loves us? Dare we hate the ones he loves?

I’ll always speak of revival, of the church’s call to speak grace to lives. In everything we do, we can offer the Good News, greater than hate, thatcan overcome brokenness, bring home the lost, and offer community to those drifting toward the edge. It requires a willingness to share, to love, to be with.

And a few words now about guns, because how can we not talk about guns?

My son had to train, qualify, and pass a test to carry an AR-15 in his police car, but you or I or an 18-year-old can buy one today, along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition. A 10-year ban on the sale of automatic weapons in the United States expired in 2004. Have you felt safer over these past 18 years?

Freedom untempered by shared responsibility is lawlessness and chaos. God gave us common sense. Please, let’s use it for the good of the life we share and the good of our children and neighbors. The New Testament has a lot to say about Christian freedom, but nowhere is it defined as MY right to do as I wish, regardless of others. We’re in this together on this table we share, and we have visited too often the common ground of grief. Can THIS shared moment of tragedy finally set us on a shared search for answers?

I have to approach moments like this as a Christian and a pastor—it’s who I am—and, from that perspective, there is one question I need to ask. What does Christ’s love look like in this moment? Ideas?

In the meantime, I’ll meet you at the cross.