gun violence – Peculiar Faith

“Do not be Terrified”: Hope for the Apocalypse

“The situation is dire, and the future looks grim; now is the time for hope.”

Typical critiques of religious faith include complaints about rosy-colored optimism, or a kind of mass delusion. But I have been reminded recently that what is often derided as “pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking” isn’t actually outrageous enough to be biblical. It’s only when our imaginations are truly stretched and taxed, when a vision of flourishing life takes incredulity to new heights, only then are we tapping into the astonishing promises of a wildly extravagant God.

“The situation is dire, and the future looks grim; now is the time for hope.”

This is not new; we’ve been here before—exactly a year ago, in fact. And the year before that. And the year before that, just as our liturgical calendar insists. As Advent approaches and the liturgical year winds down, we start hearing from so-called “apocalyptic” texts on Sunday mornings, whether from ancient prophets or gospel writers.

I refer to these as “so-called” apocalyptic texts because of the unfortunate historical baggage the word “apocalypse” drags along with it, which is most often associated with unspeakable disasters.

So let’s remember that this ancient Greek word does not demand that we think of catastrophe when we hear it. The word “apocalypse” comes from a rather ordinary Greek verb that simply means something like taking the lid off a jar—which is why it’s often translated as “revelation.” In that sense, an apocalyptic moment is whenever something that was hidden is being revealed.

So let’s consider what that word might mean when we apply it to something more momentous than a jar, like human history. Most people assume that apocalyptic texts predict the coming of disaster in the midst of relative peace and calm. Remarkably, it’s more often exactly the opposite: in the midst of unfolding disaster, apocalyptic texts reassure us that hope is not in vain; beneath the repeated surges of social collapse and violence, there dwells an unconquerable joy. Or so most apocalyptic writers try to insist.

A classic example of this is the text from Isaiah appointed for today, which is one of my favorite texts about social and economic justice as well as the end to death and destruction.

It’s important to remember that the several writers who contributed to the one book called Isaiah did not, for the most part, live in happy times. To the contrary, many of the texts in Isaiah were produced following the unimaginable catastrophe of exile, of seeing God’s own people defeated by invading armies and carted away from their homes to a foreign land where they would reside for many generations.

And yet, and still Isaiah writes of hope in soaring terms, not because of what he was at that time able to see, but because of his trust in the faithfulness of God. God’s faithfulness, not ours, that makes all the difference for hope. And Isaiah imagines such divine faithfulness to sound like this:

I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating…
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight (65:17-19)

“The situation is dire, and the future looks grim; now is the time for hope.”

A friend of mine said that to a small gathering of bishops a few years ago, and they seemed very perplexed by it. Even religious leaders can have trouble grasping the dynamics of hope in times of distress. Luke’s Jesus seems to be noting something similar in the hair-raising passage appointed for this day (21:5-19).

As Jesus enumerates impending disasters and world-ending scenarios, he points toward the one thing his listeners thought would be the most stable and secure, the one location of divine guarantee—the temple in Jerusalem. Even this, Jesus says, will be deconstructed and dismantled, every single stone of it. stones_israel

I read Luke’s Jesus in the light of Isaiah’s resilient hope: something old needs to die before the new thing God is creating can come about.

Letting go, clearing space, removing the rubble—even the most cherished bits of rubble—this is what faith sometimes demands when we live in hope.

But I’m also noticing something else in this gospel passage that I hadn’t quite noticed before. Luke’s Jesus says, “do not be terrified.” Most of us, I’m guessing, are more accustomed to hearing Jesus say, “don’t be afraid.” The stakes seem to have gotten much higher in this passage, traveling from ordinary fear to sheer terror.

As I pondered what that difference looks like, I thought about the high school in Santa Clarita, in southern California, the site of the latest incident of gun violence where three students died, including the shooter (he was a student, too), and I thought about how many students go to school every day in this country whose ambient fear can quickly turn into terror.

I also thought about all the young children separated from their parents at the U.S. border with Mexico—some of them not much older more than infants. The latest count at the end of last month was a staggering 5,400 (though some agencies suspect the number is much higher). Terror must surely saturate those detention centers at the border, wounding and scarring not only the children being held there but all the adults who work there.

As if this were not enough, I was reading about the devastating brush fires in Australia, still burning out of control, and I came across a story of people helping kangaroos, possums, and koala bears who had been singed or badly burned in the fires; these are wild animals yet very readily and apparently gratefully accepted help from humans, even embracing them. The clinical director of the only koala hospital in the world summed up why: “[These koalas] are terrified.”

koala

It turns out that the Greek word for “terrified” can also be translated as “startled” and it appears only twice in the gospel according to Luke: the first time in the apocalyptic passage appointed for today, and the second time in a story about resurrection, about encountering the risen Jesus. Stories of resurrection are also apocalyptic and startling—stories that reveal the stubborn persistence of life beneath the shroud of death.

We will continue to have good reasons to be terrified, perhaps increasingly so as ecosystems falter and previously secure institutions collapse. So it seems to me that what we Christians do in churches will matter more and more.

Gathered at the Eucharistic Table, we can remember the faithfulness of God, the God who startles us by bringing life out of death. We might also remember the possums, the kangaroos, and the koalas.

Why? Because in times of distress and terror, it’s quite natural for human communities to divide and fragment and splinter; some unsavory types will almost always exploit those moments for their own gain, as we see today in detention centers and concerning gun violence.

We must bear witness to another way, the way of deep solidarity. Just as possums, kangaroos, and koalas reached across the species barrier to embrace their rescuers, we must learn anew how to reach across the many lines that divide us from each other; that, too, is what the Eucharistic Table offers. And we will need this more and more.

After all, the situation is dire and the future looks grim; now, now is the time for hope.

bread_wine_grass

Counting the Deaths that Count in Eastertide

I know how many people were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School (26, not including the perpetrator and his mother) and how many died at the Boston Marathon bombing (3). I know this (without needing to “do a Google”) in part because these horrific events took place rather recently.

I know these numbers for other reasons, too. Both of those tragic moments happened in places where I can imagine myself visiting or strolling; I can easily see my godson’s younger brother as a student at Sandy Hook. And all but a few of those thirty-one people who died were white.

I have never visited a Sikh temple nor have I ever traveled to Pakistan. There are parts of the San Francisco Bay Area (where I live) that I might drive through but likely never “visit.” Yet in all of those places adults and children alike have died, violently and recently. I have no idea how many unless I look it up and then search carefully through all the online search results:

Six died at a Wisconsin Sikh temple last August. Since the Sandy Hook shooting last December, 35 have been killed by gun violence in Oakland (10 miles from my house), four of them teenagers. In my own city of Richmond, 7 have been killed, one of them a teenager. (Slate offers a sobering but helpful interactive map of gun violence in the U.S., though the statistics are strangely hard to confirm.) Only God knows, literally, how many have died in U.S. drone strikes overseas. In Pakistan alone since 2004 drones have killed 2,358 people, 175 of them children. (Those numbers are disputed by various reporting agencies, but this animated graphic proves helpful and chilling.)

The vast majority of all those victims were not white.

Now, to be sure, these situations (let alone my memory and attention span) are complex, multi-layered, inflected by news cycles, the “spectacle factor,” and so much more. The troubling fact still remains that I remember or know anything at all about white deaths on the other side of the country and so little about the deaths of people of color in my own backyard. Without resorting to Google yet again, I could not remember how many died just a year ago at Oikos University, a school affiliated with a Korean Presbyterian Church in Oakland (7).

I suspect something deep in the human psyche draws our attention rather naturally to the fate of those who seem most like us. If so, then white people (like me) need urgently to stretch beyond that natural tendency in a country where the vast majority of policy makers are white (and male); in a country where national news media train their spotlight on a small-town elementary school but not on inner-city streets; in a country where significant gun control legislation finally appears on the docket only after mostly white children are killed but not after mostly Asian students are shot by an Asian gunman. (The New York Times Magazine recently published a retrospective piece on the University of Oikos shooting titled, appropriately enough, “The Other School Shooting.”)

We count deaths, but some deaths clearly count more than others. I started pondering that disparity as I sat transfixed (like so many others) by the news coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing. Somewhere in the back of my brain I wondered why the whole country seemed fixated there but so rarely on Oakland, Richmond, Atlanta, New York City, or Chicago.

The specter of terrorism is clearly part of the answer. One of the Boston victims (who lost a portion of her leg in the bombing) said that it reminded her immediately of the September 2001 attacks. She was not alone, and that may be part of the problem. A commentator in London recently noted that Americans tend to panic over the prospect of international terrorism (shutting down an entire city) but seem to accept daily gun violence as routine. Those living with such violence, however, consider it anything but “routine” and more like terrorism. (Over the last two years such violence has gone up by 52% in the Bay Area where residents feel “besieged.”)

Since Sandy Hook last December through March 22 of this year, 2, 244 people have been killed by gun violence in the U.S. The demographics lurking behind those statistics are just as significant. White Americans are five times more likely than African Americans to commit suicide with a gun. African Americans are far more likely than white people to be killed by someone else with a gun. Suicide rates are the highest in states with the highest rate of gun ownership and tend to concentrate in rural areas. Homicides involving guns happen far more frequently in our cities. Digest those demographics for a moment and notice the polling data: Nearly 75% of African Americans support tighter gun control legislation while not quite half of white Americans do. (The difference between how we perceive suicide and respond to homicide matters here, too.)

Admittedly, I find statistics numbing and difficult to decipher. More visceral and gripping are the images of those Sandy Hook children and the carnage at a marathon finish line. Mia McKenzie by contrast finds those images numbing in what she names an “erosion of empathy.” Counting only the deaths that appear to count (judged by news media and Congressional action) has slowly worn done her capacity to care. Here’s how she describes it from a blog post I urge all of my white friends to read:

Some of it has to do with the fact that the wars and subsequent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have gone on for more than a dozen years. For many of the younger folks I know, that’s the better part of their entire lives. It’s a whole third of mine. For a dozen years we have watched as the mainstream media has ignored the deaths of so many brown children, day after year after decade. I mean, they were ignoring the deaths of Black children all over the world, including here, way before that, but we didn’t have to see them ignoring it so blatantly every morning and afternoon and evening and night on TV (that 24-hour news cycle is a bitch; they have time for everything except our stories).

Surely the peculiar faith of Christians has something to say here – peculiar, that is, especially for white Christians in this Easter season as we celebrate the resurrection of a brown-skinned Palestinian Jew executed by an imperial army outside the city gates. Would that death have attracted dozens of television camera crews and even more front page news stories?

Perhaps we need an Eastertide discipline as much as we do a Lenten one. A modest place to begin might be noticing the deaths that count and why they do. The U.S. Congress may have (inadvertently?) done just that by awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to four African American girls – fifty years after they were killed in a Birmingham city bombing.

Soul Sickness and Domestic Terror

I can’t get the words of an old African-American spiritual out of my head:

“There is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.”

Those words came to me yesterday morning as I read about the mosque in Joplin, Missouri that had been burned to the ground overnight, apparently because of arson. This is the same mosque that was damaged by an arsonist earlier this summer (on the Fourth of July, no less).

That old spiritual keeps coming back to me as we learn more about the terrorizing of worshiping Sikhs outside of Milwaukee over the weekend, just two weeks after Batman movie-goers were gunned down in a Colorado theater.

It’s time we recognize all of these as just the latest symptoms of a serious societal sickness in the United States. Whether this sickness is treatable or proves to be fatal to the soul of this nation will depend in large measure on our collective willingness to diagnose it and to speak truthfully about its consequences.

Whatever we might learn about the perpetrators of these acts of violence will matter less than whether we can address what truly ails us as a society. Whoever is elected President this November needs to stand up in January during the State of the Union Address and be perfectly frank: “The state of our union is not good.” And here are just two of the reasons he could cite.

Money Buys Truth
What would you do with $6 billion? Corporations and lobbying groups will spend at least that much buying this year’s presidential election. But the real cost is truth-telling.

Politicians won’t speak the truth for fear of losing corporate money and most people don’t even want to hear the truth because it would mean changing the way we live. Most of us don’t want to hear about where our computers are made, how our food is raised, what petrocarbons do to the environment, who foots the bill for legislation, and why white supremacy still shapes nearly every one of our cultural institutions.

A project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center recently noted that the 2012 presidential campaign is on track to be the most deception-laden of all. An NPR story from a few months ago suggests that fiercely partisan divisions aren’t going away any time soon. This means in part that what we really need right now likely won’t happen: grown-up conversations about gun violence and racism.

Untreated Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
I remember vividly where I was when the twin towers fell. Even today, I tend to look up with a twinge of anxiety when I hear a low-flying plane in the San Francisco Bay Area. That is surely mild compared to the post-trauma symptoms of New Yorkers.

While I’m a big fan of “retail therapy,” I hardly think that keeping New York’s Fifth Avenue shops open for business after the 9/11 attacks suffices to address the trauma of terror.

The virulent anti-immigration rhetoric over the last ten years bears witness to our collective post-traumatic stress disorder. All “foreigners” are suspect, especially if they don’t speak English, or have dark skin, and even more especially if they wear turbans. (Read this excellent commentary about guns, white men, and madness.)

(Wade Page, the shooter in Wisconsin, sported a 9/11 tattoo and had been tracked for years by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his involvement in white supremacist groups.)

This could be an occasion to address not only post-9/11 trauma but the longer traumatic legacy of African slavery and economic stratification. Something has gone terribly awry when white people among the working poor are unable to make common cause with African-Americans among the working poor – this is the classic “wedge” that politicians have learned to exploit with corporate money.

People are traumatized. People are fearful and anxious. Way too many people can’t put food on their tables. These hard realities are mapped to race, to color, to language, to culture, and, sadly, to turbans. We must find a way to talk about this.

So how might we begin to diagnose even these two symptoms? Christian traditions (among others) have a word for it: sin.

Self-styled liberal Christians shy away from this, but I think it’s time to name it. I don’t mean the rightly caricatured “Santa Claus God” who checks his list to see who’s been naughty or nice. I mean instead how both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament treat “sin” as anything that prevents the full flourishing of life and relationships, which the Creator intended for all.

Back in the 19^th century a religious philosopher/theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, described the human condition as a “sickness unto death.” This sickness results from the self’s turning inward on itself instead of outward, in relation. This, Kierkegaard said, leads to a spiral of despair, and surely today we are on that brink.

Some indigenous peoples in North America referred to the same thing as “soul sickness.” That’s how they made sense of their encounter with Europeans, whose obsession with private property and their inability to share what they had with others perplexed them. The Chippewa had a cure for this soul sickness: organizing your community for the sake of the common good.

Treating the tragedies in Aurora, Oak Creek, and Joplin as isolated incidents of potentially mentally unstable individuals only perpetuates our denial. We need to name our collective illness before we can find healing.

Surely faith communities can help facilitate those conversations, and not merely for naming what ails us. Surely leaders from all of our religious traditions could stand together, put aside doctrinal bickering, and bear witness to solidarity, and thus to a vision of hope, of the possibility of healing, and of a way to live together differently. Surely now is the time.

There is a balm in Gilead, to make the wounded whole;
there is a balm in Gilead, to heal the sin-sick soul.