Slighty revised conclusion to Sandy Hook essay...

Sorry that this continues to be a work in process but...

Conclusion

So here’s where I come out in all of this – and I offer it up as one of many modest proposals to be evaluated by the whole American community.

·       First, I have come to own the fact left to myself, I miss and get wrong at least as much as I get right – and probably a lot more.  I need the wisdom, experience, prayer and honest critique of many other people to help me towards the truth.  In writing this essay, for example, it was essential for me to check in with a physician, a counselor, a clergy person and gun owner from time to time.  Their wise counsel and correction helped me claim my blind spots and question my snarky and/or cheap conclusions.  I would suggest that what is true for me is equally true for a public conversation about radical safety in America:  we need one another to move forward.  We have differing cultures to try and comprehend together.  We often have different stories, family histories and moral constructs, too.  As the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez observes in “Yo No Soy Yo” – I am not I… I am the shadow walking beside me whom I do not see.”  We need one another to help us claim our deeper truths.

·      Second, to that end, I sense that in addition to the various legislative initiatives being championed the time is also right for a series of quiet and safe informal conversations – call it potluck diplomacy – that bring together people in union halls, faith communities, public libraries and private homes for shared food and dialogue.  This is one way to live into the solutions we are seeking – reclaiming a discipline of prefiguative hope – for it gives shape and form to our prophetic poetry.  And as Parker Palmer has observed, not only do Americans like to eat, but we love to talk.  

Open and honest conversations in a setting of deep hospitality, held as an ongoing program in a congregation, can plant seeds of healing and civic unity around… a variety of contentious and painful issues in our time.  And when a meal between conflicted parties begins with everyone bringing food to share, the silent subtext of the conversation is “We have the capacity to care for another and collaborate toward a common good.

·        Third, as should be apparent by now, new alliances of trust must be forged, new friendships created and new acts of political cooperation encouraged.  Here is where building bridges with our nation’s prophetic poets becomes crucial for those who have been charged with cultivating the imagination can be true lights in our darkness.  Sustainable agriculturalist and poet, Wendell Berry, spoke of the challenge of this moment in time with penetrating clarity when he said that we are being called beyond the fear of our stagnant status quo into a deep and radical freedom. This freedom is greater than political ideology, more profound than our polarization and more important than we can imagine because it embraces all that we fear with kindness and trust that God’s grace is greater than even our enemies.  Berry notes that our current:

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred. Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob. It makes cowards brave. And there is nothing more fearful than a religious mob, a mob overflowing with righteousness – as at the crucifixion and before and since. This can happen only after we have made a categorical refusal to kindness: to heretics, foreigners, enemies or any other group different from ourselves.

·       And fourth, all of this work – the poetic, the prophetic and the political – is to secure meaningful legislative changes while offering discovering new alternatives to our culture of violence.  The Obama recommendations not only need revision, they need the wisdom of all of us.  The NRA perspective not only needs to be delegitimized, it must be corrected.  Laws alone will not help us move beyond our moral impasse nor will calcified commitments to outdated habits.

For a moment in time, the consequences of our violence have awakened us from the slumber of ignorance or neglect.  We have been summoned by our grief to make a contribution to the beloved community.  Together we are discerning that while new laws and procedures might be helpful, much more is needed, too.  In another time, another poet from Massachusetts, James Russell Lowell, who was the first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote words for a new hymn some know as “Once to Every Man and Nation.” They first appeared in the Boston Courier on December 11, 1845 but continue to resound with a truth the cries to be heard nearly 175 years later.

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side;

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth,
They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.