Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
-Albert Einstein (attributed)
It’s a macabre ritual that this country goes through with alarming regularity (though it had receded from the front page of the newspaper allowing for a short sabbatical for the majority of politicians’ thoughts and prayers). It would seem even mass murderers had quarantined in the midst of a global pandemic, leaving their AR-15s in the closet. But, with the gradual opening up of the country, as something that resembles normal has commenced what will be a long journey to get back, those darker moments in which the soul of the nation gets rended again and again, have returned, as well.
Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting
By now, there can be but a scant few whose age spans more than 5 or 6 years who don’t know at least some of the words of the liturgy that we recite together each time. My 7 year-old has learned what it is like to have active shooter drills with his classmates. My 13 year-old listens to the news enough with us that he is aware when the nation has entered into the “thoughts and prayers” phase of the cycle, even though he knows that that is neither how thoughts, nor prayers, are supposed to work. Moreover, he has had to live in a world in which he sees how his parents struggle anytime the observance begins anew as they are cast back to their own experience of the ritual, his mother carrying his 7 month-old fetal form while his father sped them through the campus of Virginia Tech trying to get off school grounds before state police dropped a net over the whole place and prevented their escape. They know, just as, no doubt my 2 year-old will one day understand, as well. It is impossible to not be cognizant of the movements of the national sacrament of pain, anguish, and lament.
This time around, I am heartened, somewhat, by the response of my friends, many of whom have been in the struggle for far longer than I have been, as they have once again tried to move our national to care. I wish I could share a measure of their strength and hope. Mine departed from me about the time that the ritual marked the passing of twenty 5 and 6 year-olds that occurred when a man walked into a school in Connecticut, less than 3 hours from where my own 6 year old was in school, and enacted a carnage that would have seemed over-the-top in some dystopian novel. The collective apathy by so many entrusted to create laws to protect the children of our nation in the face of such overwhelming pain was all I needed to see to know that there was no level of carnage that would spur change.
Preaching in the weeks to come, in the midst of Advent, I spoke the words that I believed God wanted to be said from every pulpit in the country—of a joy that must necessarily extend beyond a simple happiness and be more grounded in our faith in God and not in the weapons of war constructed by men, a love that transcended all division, and a Christ whose arrival both announced a “dawn of redeeming grace” and a time when “no stone would be left on stone— but all those words felt hollow. In many ways that hope and strength that I possessed prior to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting has never actually come back.
Taken from: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/24/980838151/gun-violence-deaths-how-the-u-s-compares-to-the-rest-of-the-world
The reality is that part of this return to a more normal state entails a renewal of the Faustian bargain that we made some time ago when we, as a nation, decided that neither a militia, nor well-regulation was needed to counter-balance the right to keep and bear arms. Moreover, we have come to a consensus that the cost we pay for being one of the most gun saturated countries on the planet, that of the loss of innocent life that occurs in staggering numbers (44,000 gun deaths in 2020), represents resources well-spent at the altar of freedom. Nothing that I have seen in the period of time that has elapsed since news coverage of mass shootings have resumed (seven in the last seven days) suggests to me that anything will be different with this new invocation of the ritual.
There comes a time in the life of all the faithful in which we can recite the different elements of a religious service by rote memory. The prayers, the sacraments, and the scripture all begin to be woven into the minds and souls of the faithful and this time is no exception. There are and will continue to be those who call for increased attention given to the mental health of the nation while simultaneously not putting any of the considerable capital of federal or state budgets behind such a demand. And I do not believe for a second that those who call for additional mental health awareness would recommend that there be some kind of sanity threshold for owning a gun. Earlier this week, another worship leader said that the nation didn’t have a gun problem but merely an “idiot problem” though I cannot imagine a scenario in which this person would support the use of an IQ test to determine one’s fitness for the procurement of a firearm. We really should expect more from our liturgists.
It is not lost on me that we are returning to the season of increased coverage of mass shootings as we in the Church are coming to the end of the observing of Lent. Next Thursday we will read in the Gospel of Matthew of the response of one of the savior’s followers to his imminent arrest in which he drew a sword and cut the ear off one of mob who has come to take Jesus away. We will also hear the words of Jesus as he chided his disciple that those who “live by the sword will die by the sword.” Can anyone really believe that had this event transpired in the contemporary moment that the Messiah’s apostle would not have been carrying a gun, shooting the high priest’s servant? Moreover, can we really not extrapolate that Jesus would have had the same warning for all those who put their faith in a pistol that they will also die by a pistol?
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Eminent physicist (and placeholder for the concept of genius), Albert Einstein is purported to have once quipped, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” This seems a fitting charge and benediction for the nation’s worship service. Our country’s leaders seem contented to recite the same liturgy that they do each time we gather together to share in this excruciating and yet painfully banal ritual of exceptional gun violence. The tenets of these faithful adherents demonstrating both the divinity of our founding documents and their firmly held creed that the best response to suffering and death is to do nothing but take our place in the unbroken circle that will, without a doubt lead to the same place again and again and again. So it goes…
I am encouraged by those who are willing to try once again engage in the Sisyphean task of pushing that boulder up the mountain. I just can’t believe that it will do any good.
God help us all.
*-Cover image taken from the Denver Post