Dear God, we cry, dear Lord, how much blood can humanity shed before we become something other than the body that you formed, and the spirit that you breathed, and the image that you called very good?
My Christ, can we lay down our weapons and crawl beneath your Cross, weep and water the ground there, turn it to mud with our repentance?
Dear One, we need to be created anew, to be reformed by your brooding over us; we need you to patch up our clay, renew your right Spirit within us to stop the bleeding.
My Lord, have mercy.
In the midst of a crisis, in the early hours of a tragedy, we are short on details and rightly cautious of certainty. The dead are not yet all identified; the injured hover on the edges of mortality. Grief clouds the very air with the fog of tears and the siren cries of mourners. The one thing we know for sure is that there has been a shooting, and that this is bad.
Against a backdrop of war and unrest elsewhere, the image of a man with military training and a military-style weapon rampaging through the quiet night of home is particularly chilling.
It is a scene that we have encountered before, and one that is fresh each time in its infliction of new pain upon another community. We struggle to respond because we have responded so many times now, and still it happens, to people we love, and to strangers on the news, and to connections six times removed, and it seems to get closer each time, too.
We struggle to respond, but respond we must, because we are called to love God more than anything else in our lives, and our neighbors, our neighbors as ourselves, and we cannot do that without sharing the burden they cannot lay down, not yet.
We begin with prayer, whether in the vigils held in Maine and online, or in the quiet of our own souls. We begin with prayer, whether that is in words or in deeds, beating the remains of a gun into a garden tool on the forge, whittling the stock of a rifle into a cross, or giving blood. We begin with lament, crying out to God for the blood that has been spilled, and hearing the echoes of heaven crying with us.
In those echoes, we hear that we are not helpless to change our situation. Within hours of the news out of Lewiston, a politician changed his mind about assault weapons, admitting to, “a false confidence that our community was above this, and that we could be in full control, among many other misjudgments.” Admitting that we are out of control is a good way to begin to change. It might even be called repentance.
And we are out of control. This month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments aimed at striking down a federal ban on the possession of guns by individuals who are subject to domestic-violence restraining orders, according to the SCOTUS blog. The plaintiff argues that there is no history or tradition of laws, “punishing members of the American political community for possessing firearms in their homes based on dangerousness, irresponsibility, crime prevention, violent history or inclination, or any other character trait or legislative goal.” But overtly allowing irresponsible, dangerous, violent gun ownership will not advance the goals of peace, nor life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It will lead only to more lockdowns, and funerals.
Repentance is not an end in itself. Repentance turns us toward the kingdom of God that might be, the reign of heaven that will be. It is a resolution: our sins are resolved and absolved and our lives are strengthened, our wills made more resolute to walk in the ways of God, the ways that lead to peace.
In the meantime, in the midst of the crisis, we sit in mourning for the dead and in solidarity with the suffering. But we do not grieve as those who have no hope. For we are neither hopeless nor helpless in the face of tragedy, we who follow a crucified Saviour. The worst has happened. Resurrection is yet to come.
