As with any loss of life or bad news we hear, the first and most appropriate response is simply to participate in the hurt and affirm the pain of suffering. A bunch of people were killed yesterday and that sucks.
When things like this happen, I get angry. Not really at anyone in particular, but at everyone in general. It's a simple response that's fraught with complications:
STOP KILLING PEOPLE!
If everyone stopped killing people, no one would be killed. Hard to argue with that logic. Of course it's not likely everyone will stop killing people and if the good guys stop killing the bad guys the bad guys are going to kill more people than they otherwise would. So we all keep killing as if it is a sane act simply because it can be justified through some logical stream of consciousness.
The main problem I see is that people aren't numbers. We forget that sometimes. We forget that in medicine and in war and in elections and in church. People are people. They are individuals and we are all interconnected in one giant mass called "people." (Theologically we should probably include all of creation in that giant mass, but that could be a bridge too far for today.) It's not so simple as "killing one person today, saves fifteen tomorrow." Beyond the fact that people aren't numbers, it's awfully difficult to predict the future and it's just plain asinine to think that killing someone, with or without good intentions, affects only that person.
The great Brian Zahnd speculated on mass killings as an idea a bit. It's an interesting read.
What we do has an effect on the world around us. The things we see today and results, partly, of things done previously. I'll say again, people are not numbers and we're not isolated individuals - we are individuals in community whether we like it or not. Things effect us.
(A brief side note, I finished Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers recently - I know, I'm close to a decade behind - but the research he highlighted on the cultural foundations of our inborn reactions, even generations removed from their principal causes is both outrageous and amazing. We are not and can not be isolated!)
My thoughts on this are obviously rooted in Jesus Christ, who chose death over killing and in doing so rendered death impotent of real power (despite all appearances to the contrary, both from Christians and otherwise). The ethical implications of which are exemplified in the earliest Christians and explored for modern readers in the theology of the Anabaptist tradition and laid out by bad-ass prophets like Stanley Hauerwas, among others.
Yes, the degree to which, and situations where, killing might be acceptable for Christians is a difficult conversation. In the end, the Christian response is simply to call each other and the world to less violence. Hence:
STOP KILLING, PEOPLE!
I first started thinking about this on a large scale when considering Israel and Palestine. They shoot rockets at each other and blow up buildings and arrest people over a legitimate, complicated, historically-rooted dispute that will likely never be settled. Just on a practical level, if they're ever going to move past violence, one side is going to have to denounce violence preemptively - instead of the current posture of "no, you do it first."
Whatever side of that, or any particular tense situation you may consider sane, logically, it is the sane person who should expected to act rationally. Of course, one can't trust the insane to act sanely - but neither is the insane guaranteed to act insanely simply because of their lack of sanity.
What I'm saying is, take the chance. Yes, it's a chance which could cost your life or the lives of lots of other people, but it's better than banging your head against a wall for another 6,000 years. AND, guess what? You look a lot less threatening to the other guy if you stop actually threatening him. The same would likely be true if roles were reversed.
I use the sane/insane argument not because I believe those roles fit well in any conflict, but because those involved in the conflict believe them. If you're the sane one, do the sane thing.
STOP, KILLING PEOPLE!
Killing is contagious. The more advanced we get in our technology the further we come from actually physically understanding the reality of killing. When it was hand to hand combat and you had to grip the throat of an enemy and physically feel the remaining air in his lungs disappear - that's a difficult position. It was never taken lightly. When you can punch buttons on a keyboard and blow up an occupied house 15,000 miles away, then go home to dinner with your wife and kids - that's a lot of distance. The more killing we do, the easier it is to kill. That's not just for individuals, but for societies as a whole.
It trickles down. There's all this debate about why the US has so many gun deaths despite lower gun ownership rates than, say, Canada. There's a lot of factors going into it, a lot. One I never hear is that we live in the only developed country on Earth that still executes people. Could it be so simple as "my daddy does it, so it must be ok?"
It starts with society - and it trickles down to individuals. When we're part of a system that uses killing to impose an understanding of morality on the world, we should not be surprised to find individuals within that society who use the same logic - even if their morality is ridiculous and flat out wrong.
If you or I stop killing people, people will still get killed. I don't like what's going on in Syria anymore than anyone else (and I can't think of a single person on the planet, Asad included, who likes what's happening there). I have the same response for Syria that I do for the United States:
STOP KILLING PEOPLE!
I do not pray for quick resolution to war. I don't even pray for a cessation of fighting. I pray that every armed combatant everyone, on a battlefield or angry at home, will just lay down their weapons and renounce fighting altogether. I pray that words like war and peace will lose all meaning because people have refused to fight so long, they've forgotten what it means to kill.
Please, just stop killing people. It may not make a lot of sense in the short term; the math might not add up well (it probably won't). But in the end, the simple statement remains true: if everyone stopped killing, no one would be killed.
One of the things I love about this world God made for us is that things don't have to be real to be real. There's no truth to the fact that this plaque or the man it memorializes ever existed. However there's great truth in the idea of making and placing a plaque commemorating the local curmudgeon.
This fictional park can stand in for any community, any place where people gather and live their lives together, whether intentionally or not. Roger Bucklesby hated the park, but he was an essential part of it. He may have wished, loudly, that the park didn't exist and that its inhabitants were sitting at home... or dead (we can make our fictional Roger Bucklesby as mean and angry as we'd like - I picture him as a retired, near-penniless member of the British upper-class, always wearing a dapper suit, a bowler hat, and a ghastly frown).
What the plaque represents, however, is how essential he was to the ecosystem of the park he loathed. His animosity must have been public or else no one would be able to memorialize it. There's some truth to the idea that visceral hatred like Roger's helps to bring out the positive aspects of the park experience for those who may otherwise take it for granted.
We are all involved in lots of communities - families, workplaces, teams, coffee shops, bowling alleys, churches and yes, parks. We all know those people who like to complain and drag their feet, those people who we're not sure why they stick around. But they are around. Roger, may God rest his soul, was around. They participate. Even if it's begrudgingly or menacingly or agrivatingly. They're present.
It's good to remind ourselves that everyone has a place. Everyone deserves to and must be included. In our efficiency obsessed world we often steamroll the slackers and the malcontents as useless for reaching the goal. Sometimes we steamroll the weak and the slow, when they really don't deserve it.
Everyone has a place. It's often those who seem most out of place who can best remind us for that fact.
I know it gets a bit kitchy to keep doing posts based on my adorable daughter, but it's fertile ground and we do spend a lot of time together, so it is, I suppose, inevitable.
I love this response and I hope it doesn't change. At some point it will be important for her to provide additional detail about potentially broken bones or bloody gashes, but I hope her first reaction is always to say "I hurt."
The truth is, we're not parts. We can't be split. We're not really us unless we include all of us. There's no division between our body, our mind, our emotions, our soul. This is a false dichotomy (or quadrichotomy, if you prefer).
We talk about someone dying and going to heaven. It's not that simple, though, because their body is in the ground. We're not exactly sure what happens when we die because people stubbornly refuse to come back to life - scripture talks about being present with God, but we're not sure what that means.
We do know, however, that the Hebrews and most other ancient peoples, saw themselves as whole - no divisions. A spirit is not you, just part of you - without the body you're not you. It's why the concept of resurrection is so important to Jewish (and later Christian) faith. Only in resurrection are we fully restored to who we are - complete.
We live in a world where everything is divided. We divide our spiritual lives from our physical, our work life from our home life and our church life, our friends from our family from our co-workers. We divide money from morals and politics from ethics. We're divided. Which means we're not whole. We're not us. We're operating like ghosts or zombies or whatever sub-human analogy you want to hold onto.
We're not us without all of us. We like to think we can take the best parts of ourselves and say "this is the real me - the rest is just dragging me down." It leads to depression and hurt and broken relationships; it leads to us being less than complete.
We are not us unless we're all of us. When one part hurts, we're hurt. When part of us is broken, we're broken. When part of us fails to live up to our expectations, we fail to live up to expectations.
The thing is, it works in reverse as well - whatever part you consider good or pure or right or wonderful, that makes you good and pure and right and wonderful. God made each and every one of us good; God made everything together good. We are good. Yeah, the rough parts, the disappointing parts, the broken parts - they leave something to be dealt with, obstacles to overcome, speed bumps to navigate. Our problems are real, but they don't determine our value.
If my daughter skins her knee, her knee needs help, a band-aid, some lotion. But she's hurt - her emotions need comfort, her spirit needs confidence to overcome the fear of pain, of being hurt again. She needs healing, not a part of her.
We are not split personalities. We're not going to be separated from our problems someday. We can't pretend they're not real or not us or that they'll go away. We just have to embrace them and recognize that we are good despite our frailties. We must remember that we're meant for redemption, reconciliation, healing.
We are good and we are loved - all of us. No split personalities.
I'm amazed how quickly she's progressing. From three steps and a lean into our arms to walking long distances over mildly uneven terrain in shoes less than a week later. I suppose we do need a sharp learning curve since the very physics of balance and bipedal motion is pretty complicated. I don't think we really give ourselves enough credit for walking most of our lives while falling over only infrequently.
My daughter is still pretty early in her walking life, though. She walks much quicker and more securely with a hand to hold. She'll practically run if you hold her hand. I really like walking, holding her hand; it makes me feel like we're going somewhere together, rather than me taking her places.
Pretty soon she'll be going most places all on her own. I'm already dreading it. I saw a friend, yesterday, who jut returned from taking his oldest child to college. I asked how it was. He said, "Tough. The house feels pretty empty these days." At another point in my life I would have expected more - a longer explanation. I have a daughter now, all I needed was the look in his eye. I knew.
We're preparing our daughter to walk on her own. Independence is important - especially when it comes to moving from one place to another. We live in a world that practically worships independence, self-sufficiency. There's something in us that feels sorry for people waiting at the bus stop - as if they're lacking something being so dependent on others for transportation.
People need to discover independence. It's an important developmental step, learning to do things on our own - my daughter's not yet 18 months old, but she hates eating anything she can't feed to herself. There's more to come.
People need to discover the importance and power of independence, but the greatest lesson we can and should learn from our experiments in self-sufficiency is just how fleeting and unrealistic they are. We need each other. We know that deep down inside, yet our society and culture tells us to let go, cut the cord, separate.
This is not to downplay the importance of our individuality, but just to recognize that independence, like dependence, is just a developmental stage. Interdependence is where we're created to be.
We're born selfish, although we don't know it. At some point we realize the things we do impact the people around us (and vice versa). We begin to differentiate. We discover our individuality and work on independence. It seems like a lot of us stagnate there. We exist in this realm where no one can tell us what to do and we're willing to do some outrageous things just to prove no one can tell us what to do. Our society doesn't help us any there; it just cheers us on.
We forget - or perhaps we never discover - that our lives aren't meant to be lived independently. We need each other. We need people to tell us what to do from time to time. Living an independent life is downright exhausting. It'll kill us (and if we're really good at being independent, no one will care)!
My daughter is learning to walk on her own. She's only going to get better at it. Still, I can't envision a time when I'll refuse to hold her hand. She'll refuse to hold mine - it'll happen a lot - but, of course, that's part of growing into our independence. If God grants enough grace, perhaps we'll have instilled the proper love and understanding in our daughter that she'll emerge from that independence and be willing to hold our hands again.
After all, if we're going on the same journey, we might as well go together.
The latter really applied for me. I've been spending a lot of time reading about origins and thinking through how our origins define us as humans and define our place in the world. I've also been forced to creation theologically in analyzing various beliefs and why we hold them - most everything goes back to the beginning.
As our professor (Dr. Joseph Coleson) mentioned frequently - if we get the beginning right, we have a better shot at getting everything else right as well. I won't claim to have any of it "right" per say, but I think there's a lot of places we've been getting things wrong.
I can't say I learned a lot of new thing this week, but I did find some wonderful context for things I've been thinking through. There were some challenges and questions and new space explored (along with some new friendships birthed).
One of the things I just can't get over is how much we've missed the primary purpose of creation (or at least our place in it). God created this big, amazing world and then put us in it to make sure things worked as God intended. Dr. Coleson put it like this: we're here to maintain relationships of integrity.
Too often humanity has treated creation like a bag of candy the day after Halloween - scooping up any and all that we can get our hands on with no understanding of appropriateness or good sense. The vast resources of the world are not there for our pleasure, but the other way around. Check Genesis 2 again - humans were created to serve creation. Even if you buy into the terrible translation of "reign" or "have dominion" in Genesis 1 - it's still reign in the image of God - a God who sacrificed life itself for selfish buggers like us.
The world isn't going to burn up - not unless you're a big believer in Zoroaster. God is at work - and always has been - at redeeming and restoring creation, bringing it to fulfillment. Our mission in life is not to save souls or get to heaven, but to live faithfully in the world and the role God created for us. All that other stuff takes care of itself if we're focused on those relationships of integrity.
I've been preliminarily looking for a new water heater (ours is 17 years old and, well, a bit testy). It turns out the more energy-efficient option isn't a match for our infrastructure, so it's a moot point, but I had a discussion with someone about the value of spending more to be efficient. He said it wasn't worth the money since the cost difference wasn't that great. My thought was, who cares, if it uses less energy over time, that's a win - even if it doesn't end up with more money in my pocket.
It's the little things. What are we willing to sacrifice to maintain the integrity of our relationship with creation?
I don't have a problem with us taking the coal and oil and whatnot out of the ground to use - I just have an issue with us doing it the cheapest possible way. If we're willing to sacrifice a bit of profit, we could leave the land relatively as it was when we began - and not sink all the protective wetlands on the Mississippi Delta into the ocean thus leaving the Gulf Coast uncomfortable open to large storms - for example.
I just happen to think that when we treat the world around us like a commodity, it makes it easier to treat each other, and ultimately God, in the same way. When Saint Francis said "Brother Sun and Sister Moon" I don't think he was joking.
People have politicized Climate Change (and it's unfathomable denial) for their own personal gain. I'm not sure what the proper political response is, but I do know it's terrible theology to assert that human beings have no control over the world around us. We've got nothing but control.
It's a pretty awesome responsibility to be God's caretaker for the world - I hope we're getting to a place where we can take that seriously. The world may just depend on it.
