Tag Archives: school shootings

Hosanna – save us!

We are used to thinking of them as the same crowd, moving from one Sunday to the next, but what if they were more like us: divided among themselves, one crying one thing and one another, each with their own ideas of whom should be saved, and how? Continue reading

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Preaching from the shadows

The sound of mallet on metal
wood and splintered flesh
ricochets around the city walls
shivering the fabric of
the crowd that clothes the alleyways
too often lost in thought and prayers
we fall without an echo
into the open grave Continue reading

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Capitalizing on panic

On the stories we tell ______________________ I saw a story in the Washington Post where a man named Kevin Thomas started making pop-up safe rooms for schools – kind of like the panic rooms that became a status symbol in … Continue reading

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Do not harden your heart

More guns in our children’s schools do not make our children, nor their teachers, safer. Continue reading

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Do not leave us comfortless

“Do not leave us comfortless.” What if our prayer was not for ourselves, for our own comfort, but that we might not be without comfort to offer to those who are beyond consolation?  Continue reading

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Eleison

Christ, have mercy, we expostulate once more. Continue reading

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Seventeen

At ten o’clock on the fourteenth day of the third month of year two thousand eighteen of this portion of our history, twenty-eight days after seventeen of their generation died in one school, in one day, countless students will leave their classes, searching for one more word of covenant, one more promise of life redeemed from the chaos. Continue reading

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Cleansing the temple

Christ, cleanse our temple courts where money changes hands to purchase  sacrificial lambs offered on the high altar hymned with thoughts and prayers and the black sheep, tethered, set aside for the devotions of white-robed acolytes, while mourners shuffle ceaseless intercessions … Continue reading

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“Startled” is putting it mildly

“I mention all of this because I am able to consider Donald Trump’s suggestion that teachers in school should carry weapons, recalling my roles as a soldier, an educator and a parent.” Continue reading

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We came here after Columbine

Let’s paint them
red, white, and blue
have some clergyman
compose a pledge
teach our children to recite it
hand on heart Continue reading

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