"Grieving My Violent Country" by Greg Arthur for Monday, 6 November 2016Do I need armed guards at the door of my church? To insure the safety of the people worshiping inside, to keep our place of worship from forever being a memorial to the murdered, do we need those willing to enact violence on our behalf?
My son always tells me when they have to practice Code Black Drills at school, how they practice hiding under desks with the lights off and trying to hide. He is smart, he understands that they are practicing trying not to die if someone, undoubtedly a well armed white man, decides he wants to kill children that day.
I think about it at the movies. Opening weekend of a big movie, packed theater, sitting down with a bucket of popcorn and my family, I wonder is this the day when violence interrupts our lives forever?
Violence, like a chemical sprayed in the air, taints the flavor of everyday life, lessen our joy, filling us with anxiety, and forcing us to view others with an air of suspicion. Bosses are terrified to fire employees lest they return to have a final, and violent, last word. Students of all ages are aware, at least peripherally, that schools are not just a place of learning, but hot spots of violence where the most broken among us make a name for themselves through unspeakable horror.
We have created this world of violence and terror. We have always worshiped our guns. From the very founding of our country we have, like the Romans before us, enabled Pax Americana through brute force. We have spent resources that literally could have fed every hungry and dying person in the world on the greatest arsenal of weapons ever imagined. My father, who spent close to four decades working for the Department of the Army, always said the unspoken motto was, "Finding peaceful ways to destroy the world."
We do not live under reasonable threat of invasion, or of the government turning our armies against us. We haven't for about two hundred years. But we passionately protect our rights to have access to at home arsenals capable of mass murder, just in case. We are more comfortable living in a world where mentally ill white men (it is almost always a white man - not a muslim - not a black gang member) can continually kill people by the dozens than living in a world where everyday people can't get access to assault rifles.
What other country in the world operates this way? Compare us to a country like Israel, living in close proximity to armed forces who have actually tried to invade or destroy them. No one has an at home arsenal in Israel. Who else thinks that the foundation of their nation is protecting universal access to firearms, regardless of their purpose or design? Why have we ever accepted this as normal?
So we grieve again today. We grieve for families that went to church and never came home. We grieve for the reach of violence, for how it can find its way into our lives, no matter where we live or who we are. We grieve that we have, for so long, spent stupendous amounts of our abundance on protecting ourselves from enemies outside our borders, and at the same time have so willingly armed the violent within our borders.
What is our way forward? How will we, especially as the Church, live in this world of violence? Will we arm ourselves too? Will we cower in fear, respond in violence, hope in faith? Will the "thoughts and prayers" of our politicians sustain us and protect us when violence visits our door?
Monday, November 6, 2017
Categories: Scripture and Discipleship
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