Responding to Sandy Hook with careful compassion: part one...

NOTE:  Over the next week I am going to be constructing a "formal paper" re: actions to be taken in the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Not only will it guide my thinking about next steps and be used as a study guide for future conversations at church, but it will also be presented to my colleagues in what is known as the Monday Evening Club.  Here is the introduction with follow-up installments to be added over the course of January.  As always, I would value your thoughts and careful reflections; please share them on this blog or by email.

For most of my sixty years I have consciously and intentionally wrestled with what it means to be a patriotic person of peace within our American culture of violence.  As a straight, middle class, white man I know I have benefited from – and been entertained by – my culture’s various violent obsessions.  I have been overtly and covertly wounded and corrupted by them, too.  At times I have protested and railed against some of our more vicious habits, spent time in therapy as a consequence of family rage and experienced in my core the blinding fury that so easily erupts into acts of deadly destruction.  As a husband, father and pastor I have also wept while keeping silent vigil with those who have survived acts of murder and suicide.

“Life is hard – and agony accompanies joy.” That’s how I have sometimes made sense of the sorrow born of our uniquely violent culture.  “Now we see as through a glass darkly,” as St. Paul wrote, “later we shall see face to face… for all have sinned and fallen short of the grace of God.”  This is the theological gap between comprehension and mystery I generally accept as another way of enduring the heart ache – always, however, always with the caveat that, “when we do get to see face to face, God damn it, I want some answers, Lord, because this pain is almost unforgivable for everyone involved.” Nearly every day I come into contact with enormous human suffering - innocent and self-inflicted - and bring it all to God in prayer as I wait upon the Lord.  As a servant of the Crucified but Risen Christ, you see, I trust that God’s presence is with us all in the agony of real life.  And I believe by faith that this present darkness will one day be redeemed, too.

But after the massacre of twenty first grade and kindergarten children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut – as well eight other adults including the shooter – it is clear to me that my grasp of what it means to wait upon the Lord has become too passive.  In addition to my personal prayers and pastoral presence, now is the time for decisive public action to limit and prohibit the spread of assault weapons in America.  Military-grade hardware and access to massive amounts of ammunition is neither necessary to protect the Second Amendment nor to advance the joy of hunting or sport shooting.  Indeed, I would argue that this is the hour to challenge the NRA and all who would blather on with vague abstractions about liberty while turning a profit by innocent death.  “For what shall it profit a man” asks my spiritual tradition, “if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?”

To my mind, there are four inter-related components that deserve our careful consideration as well as compassionate conversation if we are going to modestly challenge the cult of American violence.  The easiest – and most immediately pressing – involves new legislation that would inhibit and restrict the ability to own assault weapons while closing the loopholes concerning background checks and gun registration.  This should become a public health issue fought with as much vigor as was brought against the tobacco industry and their lobbyists.  The other three aspects of this challenge – delegitimizing the NRA and its influence in politics, honoring and understanding the role guns play in the male rites of passage in rural and southern America and elevating the use of nonviolent conflict resolution strategies – is a more demanding and long-term quest.

But to do anything less suggests at the very least an addiction to the insanity of the status quo – noting that the classic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results – and perhaps moral cowardice and political complicity.  Back in the day the old union organizing song asked, “Which side are you on?”  For me, the haunting presence of the slain children and their surviving families in Sandy Hook have reissued this question for our time – and the jury is still out about how we will classify ourselves:  so let me share my observations concerning each of the four challenges that give shape and form to which side we are on.

 

(to be continued...)