I try to write this blog every Monday, for posting on a Thursday morning. This week, I got it finished and ready by mid-afternoon but it all disappeared somehow in the website editor. I screamed in frustration and shed a few tears, worried I’d never get the hang of managing SquareSpace. But now I find I am glad that first post had gone into the ether.
Because then Tuesday happened, and yet another mass shooting in a school, another group of children slaughtered, right on the heels of an outright racial massacre just over a week prior.
The post that will never be, the one I wrote Monday, was delving into the probable overturning of privacy and reproductive rights in this country. Last week, I wrote and published a piece with a friend and colleague about the decision, and about our ire as Baptist preachers that the Gospel is used so egregiously to harm. I’d written about that process, our hopes for it, and my delight at finding a system wanting to support us and give us a platform, Baptist News Global.
It was also a chance to reclaim my faith tradition, in a similar way to how I am trying to wrap our minds around Reclaiming Our Humanity in this whole series. The term “social gospel” was coined over 100 years ago by a Baptist theologian to describe where he felt Jesus calling His people -a ministry field of people’s real lives. This meant feeding programs and hospitals, abolition and criminal justice reform, present in some ways through the work of the American church for a long time.
You can read the piece here. With the Supreme Court not yet having issued any formal decision, I know more opportunities to turn my heart towards this specific issue will come up soon.
Because I primarily do climate justice work, I am reconciled to the disconnect between action and result. There is very little we can do now to avoid climate disaster, but there is a great deal to do in order to build communities and places that could even thrive. None of it -not a single useful thing- is quick and with a direct or immediate result.
Through all of that, I have chosen to live in hope. I feel despair, to be sure, and I know the deep grief of loss that pervades all we do. The healing that is possible within Creation, when we spend time in nature and wonder and through a connection with life itself, is so real and undeniable. The cyclic truth of nature is deep magic when we are open to it, and death becomes life over and over. We too can learn to live connected and generative lives.
But there is no countering joy in the gun violence that rips through us daily. There is nothing to temper the pain when the good of the thing causing the trouble is non existent. There is no good but a vague sense that a gun will keep you safe (whereas all data shows the presence of a gun ratchets up the likelihood of injury and death) and some sort of satisfaction that you could if you really wanted to, buy a firearm. I suppose. I have no standing in that community. I do not understand the ethic at all. It counters everything I have ever believed about America and the country we are trying to be. I have spent a good deal of my adult life seeking connection there, and trying to understand. I have empathy for their fear and righteousness, I just don’t grasp the choice.
This is what I wrote in my rage and grief on Tuesday…
Stop with the outrage. We decided this with Sandy Hook. Dead children are the price we pay for the fearful and the fetishists to have their guns. We could change the laws, we could do the work to change attitudes, options, and outcomes.
But we don't. We'd rather communities and families manage this kind of grief and trauma than have hard conversations that might offend someone.
Or cost someone votes.
No candidate for any office who takes gun money of any kind will get my vote. I've attempted to screen in this way before, and my choices in that regard are pretty solid and transparent in Colorado. This is the home of Columbine, the Aurora theatre shooting, and a hell of a lot of guns. We have all the problems present everywhere else, to be sure, but we are having open debates about it, and many watchdog groups keep tabs on the flows of money in and out of campaigns and elected terms.
We must change all our gun policies to reflect what I know to be the stance of most firearm owners I know: background checks, safety requirements, no assault or military weapons, red flag laws -use of the basic mechanisms of governance and planning, research and experience. These are the systemic things we can do, and must.
And yet we never do. And that’s what’s exhausting. The entirety of the gun debate just exhausts me. The only people I think CAN make reasonable gun ownership arguments -hunters and people living with predatory wildlife- aren’t explicitly protected, in my opinion. We need change and reform and I’m afraid it will never happen. Clearly, there is no threshold on which to wait. That was what Sandy Hook taught me. We have an endless capacity to tolerate deaths that are a direct result of our inaction. And no. The slaughter of children won’t be enough to shock us into facing this. We need new laws, to be sure. Our gun access and safety laws are laughable and stronger ones will help.
But frankly, none of that will solve the deeper problems. These are the same problems that will be our obstacles is responding well to climate crises as they happen. They are the same problems that have made suicide and overdoses leading causes of death. They are the same problem that makes medical debt sound reasonable, that drive us to build gated and walled communities.
We have abandoned the commons, the ground of community and mutual care and responsibility, for the idol of the self-made individual. We no longer make decisions based on what is good for the whole, or what will feed various and diverse communities. We have established entire sacrifice zones of places where we push off the effects and consequences of our actions, acceptable as long as some subset we can reasonably call our own benefits. Our family, our Board, our cause, our neighborhood, our city -as long as the other gets nothing, or at least less or fewer, it’s fine. It’s winning as long as someone else loses.
”Taking care of our own” ensures no one can become yours, of your community or concern.
A great deal of our dis-ease, of our cultural cognitive dissonance, stems from this. We feel askew, and this is no surprise. We can only function in community, in aggregate, and yet we insist the individual is supreme. And the feelings of disassociation and isolation only grow.
Can the center not hold? Perhaps not without tending, no. Perhaps not without new vision, and a renewed sense of community obligation and gifts, of responsibilities to others and how increased connection benefits us all.
In my faith of Christianity, this is summed up by Jesus’ promise that God loves us as God loves Jesus himself. That we are known and cared for just as we are. We need not prove or gain, win or progress, to earn this trust and faith. We are called into a mutual life of community and an active love that transforms our very lives through our relationships and our systems of care.
May it be so.