Year C Proper 5: the widows of Zarephath and Nain

Posted on June 5, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

A boy died in Zarephath, and his mother and Elijah cried out to God in anger at the injustice, in bitterness at the waste of life, saved by a miracle and spent so soon. Another mother’s son died in Nain, and Jesus was moved to radical, rebellious intervening action by his compassion for her grief and heavy loss.

Once, when I was interning as a hospital chaplain, a young man came into the Emergency Room and died, and his church wanted to perform a resurrection of him. In anger and hope and frustration they sang and prayed; for the sake of the other patients and staff, they were invited to move to the chapel. They borrowed holy oils and water. They tried so hard to raise that mother’s son, their faith that they could persuade God to give back his life endured longer than most could bear.

The call to #WearOrange to commemorate the lives lost to gun violence, and to pray for a solution to that plague on our community – it is born out of our distress at injustice and wasted life; out of compassion for those suffering injury and grief; out of that burning desire for radical intervening action to reverse death and restore our common life. It is not a political movement, and definitely not a partisan one. We all want to live free from injustice, and fear, and the premature entrance of death on the scene.

After Sandy Hook, and the murder of small children in their school, we came together in this place to pray. We cried out in anger and bitterness at the injustice of it all, at the lives, little miracles, spent too soon. We were moved with compassion, and we thought that we would do anything to prevent a tragedy like that from ever happening again.

This is uncomfortable ground, I know. But if we follow Jesus, we need to go there.

On the third anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, NBC published research about the deaths of children by gun violence since December 14, 2012.  They found that a child under the age of 12 had been killed by a gun almost every other day since then. Seventy-five % of those children were killed with guns belonging to family members or acquaintances. In other words, we are intimately acquainted with the means of their deaths.

Elijah rages at the injustice and the waste of life, and Jesus is moved to radical, rebellious action by his compassion for their heavy and immeasurable loss.

What will we do?

It’s not only about the children, of course. But it was after the murder of a five-month-old baby, Aavielle, shot as she sat in her car seat in Cleveland last year that some of you asked me directly, “What can we do?”

What can we do?

I’ve been exploring that question in the meantime. Last week, I sat down with some folks from Greater Cleveland Congregations who are working with local municipalities on an initiative around smart gun technology – the kind of safety features which make it less easy for unauthorized users to access and abuse guns. In two weeks’ time, I’ll be in Columbus with colleagues to hear about a proposal for extended background checks before guns are purchased, designed to make gun ownership safer for all concerned. And we are all concerned, aren’t we? And there’s always education, a traditional vocation of the church: providing parents and caregivers information on safe gun storage if you find you must keep one in your home.

I invite you to notice that each of these initiatives is designed not to take away anyone’s guns, but rather to reduce the misuse, abuse, the wasteful and wanton violence wrought by gun violence in our communities. I will note, though, that the NBC research found that legislation to restrict the ownership of guns by partners cited in domestic violence cases likely saves the lives of children who are otherwise caught in the crossfire when their mothers are attacked by their abusers.

I don’t want to smother the gospel with statistics, like the estimated 32,000+ deaths [<-note: this from a conservative, gun-friendly source] from gun violence, either by suicide, homicide, or accidental discharge that happen each year in this country, most of which never make the evening news; or the seven young people under the age of 20 who die daily from gun violence.

I don’t want to smother the gospel with statistics, as tempting as it is to go on.

But the gospel tells us that Jesus is moved to radical and rebellious action by his compassion for the bereaved, for those left to pick up the pieces of lives shattered by death. There is little more counter-cultural than interrupting a funeral, reaching in and reversing death.

How will we follow that?

If you think that we are helpless in the face of the overwhelming toll that death doles out, let me tell you something that you did, one Sunday, a few years ago, without even knowing it.

[Trigger warning: this story is not easy to hear, especially if you have been touched by suicide or thoughts of self-harm.]

We had a visitor. Most of you didn’t notice the quiet person who slipped in just as the service began. After the service, this person made an appointment to come back and talk with me during the week. They told me that they had intended to come and tell me all of the reasons they didn’t like church. But instead, they told me another story.

On that Sunday morning, this person had woken up with the conviction that this would be the day that they would not survive; that they did not want to survive. They got in the shower and considered their options. To their surprise, the thought came to them, as though from without, that they should try going to church first. So they came, and they sat among you. They watched you sing, and pray, and share the Body of Christ. You offered them the Peace of Christ, the peace that passes our understanding, and they thought that they understood why the voice in the shower had sent them here. They left feeling … better. Not good, but better. And they came back.

“If I had had a gun at home that morning,” the person told me, “I would not have come to church.”

I am glad that they found you that morning, instead of a firearm. I wish I knew where they were today.

We come together here, week by week, and on the first Sunday of every month we pray for healing, and we hope for miracles. We know Elijah’s anger, and his bitterness at the inexplicable sufferings of life. We know the helplessness of one another’s grief. But we, too, know the healing touch of Jesus, at least a little, at least enough to bring us back, week by week, for more; waiting on and expecting his radical and rebellious action in our lives, his resurrection of our bodies and our spirits.

We may not have the power to raise the dead, but that does not mean that we give in to grief. We have so much to offer: we have our prayers and encouragement; repentance for the healing of guilt and blame. We have our hope in the resurrection, and the peace which passes understanding. And when we choose, we have radical, rebellious, intervening action, following Jesus as he stops the procession of funerals passing by, and reaches out to return a son to his mother, washing out death by the power of the life which he pours into the world.

The priest whose off-the-cuff comment started our orange stole movement also preached on grief and gun violence today: find the Revd C. Eric Funston’s sermon here.

The title of this post has been updated.

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Martyrs

Posted on June 2, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

The commemoration for tonight’s healing prayers, held in orange, is for Blandina and Her Companions, the Martyrs of Lyons.  The Collect:

Grant, O Lord, that we who keep the feast of the holy martyrs Blandina and her companions may be rooted and grounded in love of you, and may endure the sufferings of this life for the glory that shall be revealed in us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The gospel text is from Mark:

Jesus called the crowed with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

I have stored up seventeen thousand
six hundred and forty-eight days.
I hoard them in my body like water.

I hear the call to profligacy.
I wonder how it might feel
to spend them down, pouring

love like oil on the ground,
anointing Golgotha with wanton,
wasteful sorrow; prodigal.

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Year C Proper 4: un/worthy

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

There is a wideness in God’s mercy that covers the ends of the earth and beyond.

The conveners of this lectionary clearly put these stories together to demonstrate to the listening church the breadth of God’s embrace, the wideness of God’s mercy. As we heard at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit speaks all of the languages of all of the peoples.

So Solomon declares that his temple will be a magnet for the prayers of all nations. Paul preaches the one true gospel to the Gentiles of Galatia. Jesus commends the faith of the centurion, a foreign presence to the peasants of Galilee.

The in-crowd worship in splendour and in majesty, whether in Solomon’s temple or in a synagogue built on donated foreign funds. The foreigners, likewise, turn towards the altar and their prayers are graciously received.

As one who has lived, by some measure, more than half her life as a foreigner of one sort or another, the grace of God’s preference for all people is reassuring. Still, the stories themselves are not without difficulty.

Solomon’s temple was built as a testament to the presence of God with the people of God. It was built on prodigious scale, with such extravagance as to put the tower of Babel to shame in its aspirations to reach towards the glory of God. It was built that way not only to offer glory to God, but to boast to the neighbouring nations of the chosenness of the people who built it, and their special relationship with God. It was built to attract friends of God, and it was built to warn potential enemies that this was the side on which God would fight.

At the dedication of the temple, Solomon hailed it as a beacon to the nations, who would come to know God and the favour of God; God would hear the prayers even of foreigners drawn to its doors. But what of the foreigners already there?

The bible says over and again that Solomon built the temple, that Solomon finished the house of God, that Solomon lined the house with gold, and that he carved the cherubim on its walls.

 

 

Of course, Solomon did nothing of the sort. He even arranged for it that the stone used for the temple would be carved outside of the city, so that the court of the king would not be disturbed by the sound of hammer and chisel within the city walls.

The bulk of the labour for the temple came from a census that Solomon took of foreigners living in the land. “Seventy thousand of them he assigned to carry burdens, eighty thousand to quarry in the hill country, and three thousand six hundred as overseers to make the people work” (I Chronicles 2:18). So Solomon built his temple on the backs of 153,600 conscripted foreign slaves?

Fast forward a thousand years or so. The temple has been razed to the ground at the time of the Babylonian conquest; and after the return of the political elite to Jerusalem, a new temple has risen from the ashes. But foreigners, the Romans now administer the wealth and status of the city.

To the north, in Galilee, a Gentile centurion working for the Jewish king, Herod Antipas, has a slave whom he values highly. The slave becomes ill, and the centurion, who has established good relations with the community he oversees by means of generous donations to the church building fund, calls in a favour with the local religious elders. “Find me that miracle worker.”

At our Bible Study on Tuesday night, which I commend to you, we were a little merciless with the centurion. By the end, one of our members said wistfully, “I used to like the centurion.” But our hero in this little healing story is of a foreign faith, he is a slave-holder, and a wheedling, fawning politician.

He is right to tell Jesus, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof.” And yet in the next breath, he proceeds to describe just how powerful he is, just the same, telling his subordinates to jump and expecting the answer, “How high?”

He has bribed the populace into quietude, and what happens to those of his slaves whom he considers of lesser value when they fall sick?

 

 

Fortunately, the centurion is not really the hero of the story. Neither is Solomon the hero of his. The Jewish elders tell Jesus that the centurion is worthy, deserving. The foreigners flock to Solomon’s spectacle.  But it is the unseen, unnamed slave with whom Jesus is concerned at this moment, and it is he who is healed. Not even he is the hero of the story, of course: but only Jesus.

When I was growing up, we used a prayer twisted from the words of the prideful centurion as our prayer of humble access to the altar:

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you; but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

There were those of us for whom it was a heartfelt plea, and others who, like the centurion, really could not conceive of their own unworthiness, given their status in society and so on, but who prayed it anyway, just in case.

And all approached the altar of God, and none, in the time that I was watching, was struck down by lightning.

The faith that the centurion held in the power of Jesus to heal his slave did not undo the corruption of his position of unequal power, nor did it diminish his pride in his own status and ability to influence peasant preachers such as Jesus of Nazareth. Neither did those things hold Jesus back from helping him.

The helplessness of the slave, unnamed and unseen, confined in the house of a Gentile and unable to receive Jesus at his bedside; these things did not hold Jesus back from healing him.

The confusion of the elders, who thought that they were in a position to tell Jesus who was worthy and who unworthy of his attention; this did not bind Jesus.

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you; but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”

Jesus told the people, the first time he preached in his own home synagogue – not the one that the centurion had helped to build – Jesus said,

 

 

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” (Luke 4:18)

He is not bound by the confusion of pride and humiliation that brings us to the altar of God. He is not dazzled by our branding nor is he deflected by our shame, nor even defeated by our hidden sickness, our unnamed helplessness.

We come to the altar of God, the in-crowd and the outsider, the natural-born citizen and the naturalized, and the one hoping to remain unseen, flying beneath the radar. We come as cradle Episcopalians and converts, as centurions bearing authority, and as those bearing only our own names. We come, weaving slightly under the influence of a heady cocktail of keeping up appearances and dropping our guard, of self-justification and secret shame. We pray,

“Lord, I am not worthy to receive you; but only say the word, and I shall be healed,” whatever we mean by that;

and Jesus receives us here. He affirms our faith, however faltering. He astonishes us with his healing. He loves us and values us highly, not based on how we are judged or valued by the world, but simply out of the vast expanse of God’s mercy, the breadth and depth of God’s love, no exceptions.

Amen.

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The Stone Mason

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Only the mason knows the secret flaw

carved into the setting of precious stones

and metal, glorious, reflecting sunlight

and the king’s delight, having built God a home,

domesticated the Wild One, his prize.
Inspired by the whorl and swirl of a wild

flower, the labourer worked his prayer into

the very foundation of the Temple;

a small act of rebellion, under

mining the master’s design,
entreating all that is Holy,

in the language of the free –

the birds of the air, lilies of the field –

to see that which is hidden beneath.

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Reasons to #WearOrange: Devaluation

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

A confession: when we are discussing the pros and cons of an apartment to rent, our family has come to use a rather disrespectful shorthand for one particular criterion.

How “killy” the street or block has become the self-defining descriptor of choice used as a gauge by my college-aged offspring to assess the relative safety of an address at which they might rent accommodation. Factors include the relative severity of violent and violating incidents, plotted against an axis of frequency. “There’s less crime west of High,” eldest observes wisely, “but when it happens there, it tends to be really bad.” Whereas the odd gunshot at the corner gas station becomes, it would seem, par for the course.

Last fall, one of my parishioners lost his eldest child to a gas station gunshot. As I talked with the bereaved father, as I listened to him telling me how unnecessary it was for them to kill him, I was struck by the gulf between the infinite value that this man placed upon the life he had carried in his arms; and the wealth of love, life, possibilities that had been wantonly discounted and discarded, wasted by his killers.

Is it the case, I wonder, that as we have made it so easy and so commonplace to kill that we have devalued life itself in our common currency?

Even our language has changed (I am speaking for myself). In the face of foggy threats to lives and our loves beyond our control, we revert to a childish shorthand that deflects and denies and diminishes danger, and draws us together in our little circle of hope, and family.

I think I need to change my language. Perhaps it’s time to grow up and face the real grief behind the reputation that labels a street, a block as “a bit killy.” I know the value of my own son’s life. The boy passing through, the woman pumping gas, the drunken man stumbling by the gas station are worth nothing less. Nor even, nor even the one waiting with a gun, if he but knew it.

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Trinity 2016: Delight

Posted on May 22, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Wisdom calls out – the wisdom of God; we may know her as the Holy Spirit.

When she is spoken aloud, she becomes the Word. The Word was in the beginning, the yet unspoken, ever articulate Wisdom of God.

Only in our time was the Word made flesh, to live among us, when there was already a creation to inhabit.

This Sunday after the Pentecost is the time in the church year when we traditionally discuss the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and try to explain to one another the inexplicable intricacies of our God. It is difficult to know exactly how God is made up, since God was never made. All we have are hints, and the clues developed, evolved through our millennia of existing in relationship with a God in whose image we are made.

Knowledge may be elusive; but Wisdom calls, and understanding raises her voice. She speaks of delight, and of rejoicing. She speaks of the delight of God, and of her delight in the human race, created in God’s own image.

This Wisdom is not hard to find, or to understand. She calls out from the crossroads, and from the gates of town, from the portals of the important places. She cries out to all who pass by; to anyone who will listen she will impart Wisdom and understanding.

This is not always the same thing as knowledge.

Knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, comes with its shadow side. It is a gift not to be disparaged. The knowledge that fixes a car, or finds a new cure for cancer, or detects the need for a deep intervention into a network of sorrow and sin; such knowledge benefits us all, and it is good; but it depends upon our knowledge, too, of evil. Of all that can go wrong. All that can beset us, whether by design or by dastardly deed or by disease or disaster; we know too much to delight always in the creation that God has shared with us.

What we know is what Paul hints at in his letter to the Romans. We know that as often as we know delight, and rejoicing, and peace; at least that often we know suffering, and the need for endurance, and as often as not we know that we cannot endure, even when we are in the middle of doing just that. If endurance produces character, then we know that we would prefer to remain flat. If character produces hope, then we know that we would prefer fantasy. We walk in the valley of the shadow of death too often to rejoice always in the light that God has let in upon us. And yet.

Wisdom calls, and understanding raises her voice. They insist on rejoicing and delight. Despite knowing everything; despite seeing all from before the beginning of time: the goodness of creation, the depravity of its fall, our stumblings and our struggles and our little successes; still Wisdom celebrates.

Wisdom cries out, and understanding raises her voice.
We crave understanding: not only to understand the world around us, and its intricacies and intrigues and complicated rules and ruses; but we crave understanding in that we want to be understood. We long to convey ourselves to those whom we love, wishing that we could open our pages to them as the written Word and say: here. This is what I mean. This is who I am.

The Word of God was made human, and came and lived among us as a human being, in the flesh. His life is written in the books that we read and read again; he longs for our understanding still. He promises the Spirit of truth, to explain him to us, to translate the glory of God for us. To translate us into the glory of God.

At the Pentecost, when the Spirit of truth opened the minds and the doors of the disciples, they saw glory descending like a flame on one another, like fire. They understood the Word in their own words, in their own languages; and they were understood by one another.

Made in the image of God, in their language, in their words and their wisdom and their understanding they reflected the glory of God made manifest in living flames, in living men and women.
The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is a source of great curiosity and inspiration and the desire for knowledge in many people. But its realization may be less wonderful than the delight that it produces in clever explanations and cartoons and internet memes. For the prophet says, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The famous Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel might have this to say about a day dedicated to discussing doctrine:

“When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion–its message becomes meaningless.”

Instead, he advises,

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
Wisdom calls, and understanding raises her voice. They call from the rooftops and in the marketplace – get your Wisdom here! They are not difficult to find, or to understand. They tell us, no matter what we know or remember, or face; nevertheless they call to us to remember that God delights in us always, and always has, as God’s own creation, made in the image of God.

They tell us that the secret to Wisdom, to understanding – an open secret called out from the doorways and the portals of the poor and the important places – the secret to Wisdom is delight.

Delight in the creativity of God. Delight in being human, in being the creatures of God made in God’s image. Delight in creation – which means not only in what we call the natural world – as though we were unnatural, made somehow apart from the rest of God’s creation – but delight, as Wisdom says, in the inhabited world. In the world of people made in the image of God to reflect the glory of God.

We know that we are tarnished, and often too dull to catch fire. But there are moments, like Pentecost, when we see the flames, and we remember to delight in God and one another.

And there is true and holy wisdom in such delight, and in such love and wonder is the beginning of all understanding.

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Mother of sleepless nights

Posted on May 20, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

You are

the Mother of all sleepless nights.

Before the light was bound over 

to keep the peace till morning,

you neither slumbered nor rested your eyes;

before the darkness fell from sheer weary

excess of hours; as long as it took

to make us, lose us, find us crawling home 

at dawn, sliding, eliding night into day.

You are the Mother of all

sleepless nights, in curlers and slippers,

in silence, arms folded, heart unbroken,

waiting up.

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Unbabel

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

Slab-flat vowels like a block of dough
slapped down on the kneading board;
sibilant aromas of spice and fruit from afar off
mingle with crisp consonants.

Syllables roll like oranges through
the early morning marketplace; polyphonic
strangers drawn by the guttural growl
of hunger and homesickness.

So long lost in translation, the tongue
is astonished by the sudden taste of home.

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Making an orange stole

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

I’ve had a request for a pattern and/or instructions for making orange stoles for Gun Violence Prevention.

[You can read more about why I’m making orange stoles here.]

As the project has grown and been shared beyond our imaginings, I am grateful for the opportunity to share the work of making the stoles. I am not, as the following will demonstrate, a seamstress of any experience or skill; I am simply doing the best I can to place the gospel between our children and our guns.

I have used cotton fabric, 44″ wide, in two orange designs for the main front and back of the stoles. I can make four stoles out of 1-1/4 – 1-1/2 yards of fabric, rounded out with a trim at the bottom. I used a children’s handprint fabric at the ends of the stoles (I bought 1 yard in the first instance), to represent our prayers, our trust, and our responsibility, reaching up.

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I use the width of the orange fabric as a self-measuring device to make a standard length stole. The length can be adjusted by using more or less of the handprint trim.

Cut out two pieces each of the front and backing material, making sure to mirror the mitre pattern. Join the two front pieces together at the neck (hold them right side to right side, so that the seam appears on the wrong side), then join the two back pieces together in the same way. Attach the handprint trim to the ends. You now have a whole stole front, and a whole stole back.

Pin the front to the back, right side to right side, starting at the neck seam and working outward to the ends. Because these will be the longest seams you sew, be extra careful to keep them straight.

Once the pieces are joined together, turn the stole right side out, then sew up the ends by turning them in and either running across the bottom with the sewing machine, or, if you prefer an invisible finish, sewing them by hand.

This is the pattern I used for the mitred join at the neck of the stole:

stole pattern 001

Hint: open the image in a new tab if it gives you trouble.
Hint 2: this isn’t their original pattern because somewhere along the line I redrew it to the measurements I prefer, but I once got a stole “kit” from churchlinens.com and it was great. If you want something more professional and helpful, I highly recommend the kit. 

Even as I was making this post, another report was crossing my news feed of a 5-year-old child who died of gun violence – an accident waiting to happen that found its time when she found a gun under her grandmother’s pillow, and another family is torn apart.

And here, in part, is what Bishop Hollingsworth (Diocese of Ohio) told his clergy this week, writing from his sabbatical:

Awareness that gun violence is epidemic in our nation and society is essential if we are to be creative and self-sacrificing in healing the culture of fear and aggression in which we live. The notion that gun safety regulations infringe upon individual rights is unreasonable. The lack of such regulations compromises everyone’s right to live in safety.

This non-partisan witness to the Prince of Peace, who gave his own life that all might be saved, is one way of reminding ourselves and others of the self-sacrifice required of us for all of God’s beloved to be safe. It is a sign of our belief in the God who cares for every one of us as a shepherd does his sheep, and of our commitment to be the voice, hands, and heart of the Shepherd in our own time.

I commend you to God’s keeping in safety, in passion, in love.

Featured image: clergy of the Diocese of Ohio preparing to #WearOrange. Photo by the Rev. Jeff Bunke.

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Suffer the children

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Rosalind C Hughes

It was Mother’s Day weekend, a weekend of mixed emotions, to say the least. I am among the fortunate. I spent the day surrounded by family, celebrating our eldest child’s college graduation in the Columbus sunshine.

On Saturday, her younger sister and I marched across the Hope Memorial Bridge in Cleveland to remember those lost to gun violence, and to hope actively for safer times to come.

pd

via cleveland.com . The sign said, “In God we trust, not guns.”

I remember when the children were small, before we left Singapore, sitting by the pool one day watching them play. A recent arrival, a nurse named Nicki from New Orleans, was recounting her day, rehearsing with her 12-year-old son the route he would take to his new international school, across to the centre of the island. One bus driver was shocked that this mother felt the need to accompany her child on the public bus, and Nicki was concerned: was she being too protective?

“It was the same look,” she said, “that I got from other parents back home when I always insisted on asking if there’s a gun in the house before letting him go over there to play.”

I watched my toddlers and their kindergartner sister splashing in the shallow end. I thought of how I had never in their lives needed to worry about whether there was a lethal weapon in a home into which they had been invited. I could hardly imagine being in a situation where that might be a regular concern, one to check out before a play date, just in case someone might get killed.

Three years later, we moved to Cleveland.

At the rally Saturday, we heard from a gentleman who spends too much of his time visiting with the victims and relatives of gun violence in hospitals and in funeral homes, trying to wrap his arms around the wound and wrap his mind around the anger and frustration that is killing people before his eyes.

We heard from a police officer who told us that three years old is the most common age for an accident involving a child and a gun. In front of us all, she wished to God that her own grown son was not allowed a gun. It didn’t make him any safer.

kris

We heard from pastors and parents, mothers and men with t-shirts proclaiming “Moms Demand Action,” and babes in arms, toddlers in tow. Always ask, they said, if there’s a gun in the house that your child is going to visit, and if so, how it is secured.

We heard from the Distinguished Gentlemen of Spoken Word, who are “living in the fire but we do not burn.” Young men demonstrating how grow up within a world of danger with dignity, passion, and respect for themselves, for one another.

We heard the names of those young people their age and younger (as young as five months) who had died in Cleveland of gun violence since last year’s march and rally.

My youngest daughter stood beside me in the sunshine, the toddler grown now, texting her friends about gun safety. I remembered Nicki, and the son she protected with fierce wisdom and uncompromising common sense. By the time school started, she would let him ride the bus alone, having made sure he knew the way, the rules of travel, the safe way home. She would ask what she needed to know for his security and her peace of mind, and then hope, trust. Love.

The organizers of Saturday’s march and rally, God Before Guns, told the Plain Dealer, “Gun violence is definitely a mother’s issue… We’re emphasizing how many children are victims of gun violence.”

And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them unto him and said, “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.” (Luke 18:15-16)

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