March 25, 2021
7 Mass Shootings in 7 Days
That was an attention-grabbing headline that caught me off-guard, unprepared for the magnitude of all that it represents. Lives so cruelly and so senselessly cut short. Pain and suffering has been transferred from one person onto many, many others, pain and suffering that will go on for many lifetimes. When you think about all the potential that is lost, the very course of our human history is altered each and every time human life is taken, lives lost, for I really do believe that we are all connected, and what happens to any one of us affects every one of us.
It does point to a much larger issue, the epidemic of gun violence that has seized our nation at a critical juncture, when people seem more troubled and divided than ever before, particularly in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, racial reckoning, and political unrest. According to the Dallas Morning News, in 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, more than any other year in the last two decades, and 24,000 more died by suicide with a gun. It was also reported that after incidents like the ones we’ve witnessed over the past week, gun sales spike over fears of gun regulations. (DMN, 3/25/21)
Fundamentally, both personally and as a clergyperson, I believe guns must be regulated. I realize there are many, divergent views on this; however, it has yet to be proven to me that more guns produce fewer deaths. I believe that fewer guns equate to fewer deaths, however fewer guns is achieved. The use of force and violence simply are not the way modeled by Jesus Christ.
But guns point to a larger issue, one that Christians, particularly we Christians who find ourselves coming to the conclusion of yet another Lenten journey, should be wrestling with, considering, and maybe finding our place in. If guns represent the transfer of pain and suffering from one to another (even in cases of suicide, when pain and suffering gets transferred to the survivors), what are we, as Christians, doing to recognize and be with people in their pain and suffering, before they reach the point of needing to transfer their pain and suffering to others?
Remember, the journey of Lent, the great 40 desert days, is about self-reflection and introspection, going deep within, to contemplate our sin, our disconnection from God and from those around us. If we’ve been serious about that work, how can we fail to see the systemic injustice that blinds us to the plight of the pain and suffering of those who are not us? How can we fail to see and to confess our participation in all that separates us?
This Sunday, we will shout “Hosanna” once again and wave palm branches celebrating the coming of the Messiah. And we will walk the road of pain and suffering with Christ, the Via Dolorosa, so that we will have some idea what it feels like to “co-suffer.” Co-suffering is difficult because it reveals our own vulnerabilities as humans. If it can happen to them (poverty, homelessness, injustice, etc.), then it can happen to me. But co-suffering is critical, because it connects us and keeps us from becoming numb to the barrage of headlines like the “7 Mass Shootings in 7 Days.”
I urge you to take advantage of the Holy Week services along next week’s journey. Co-suffering with Jesus gives us a greater ability to co-suffer with our broken and hurting world. And that is a big first step to healing that world!
Yours on the journey,
Fr. Christopher+
