Why?

I doesn't have to be this way y'all

May 25, 2022 “Nineteen children were murdered in Uvalde, Texas, yesterday. They were elementary school students, attending their last week of classes before summer vacation, when an 18-year-old gunman came through the door and began shooting. He also killed two adults, including a teacher, and appears to have shot his grandmother in her home before going to the school. At least three kids are in critical condition.” -NY Times

Y’all I’m just sick.

Sick, numb, angry as hell, heartbroken, all of it. And I’m fed up, again. We’ve all read this script before. I’ve lived it. We’ve all walked this damned road too many times. 

But I want to say something here that might sound ridiculous, just hear me out. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

This kind of continual, causal carnage is not inevitable. This epidemic of violence can be stopped. 

Richard Rohr wrote, “Pain teaches a most counterintuitive thing—that we must go down before we even know what up is. Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance." 

Ignorance, arrogance, and I would add apathy, keep us from changing.  

Things don’t have to be this way, y’all. 

But I wonder if we’re strong enough, brave enough, to let ourselves be destabilized. I wonder if, just like all the other times, we’re going to deflect, defend, defer, safely sequestered in our ignorance, arrogance and apathy. 

I wonder if we’ll find the courage and motivation sufficient to compel us to ask the destabilizing questions: 

Why do we allow this? Why do we allow the violence, the murders, the wholesale slaughter of the innocents? 

What is the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves, our country, our history, where this kind of unspeakable terror is commonplace? 

Why do we allow the politicians to get away with taking no action apart from  deflecting, defending, deferring?

Why do we continue to participate in and promote a culture that glorifies violence, that makes a commodity of carnage and suffering? A culture that is cruel and crass and demeaning of other human beings?  That feeds on the othering of those different from us, born on the wrong side of our borders, who don’t ascribe to our political views, religious values or social mores. 

Why do we continue to support an economy built on greed and violence, waste and disposability, that promotes individual comfort and safety at the expense of anyone or anything else? Y’all, we can’t consume our way out of this. 

Why do we continue to support any church, club or institution that promotes and practices systems and hierarchies that discriminate based on gender or any other innate characteristic? Does every human being reflect the image of God or not? 

Why do we continue to be okay with all this? Why do we stop at just feeling bad, even appalled? Why do we stop with sending “thoughts and prayers”? Why don’t we do something tangible, significant, different? 

Why y’all? Why? 

Can we just sit with these and other questions while we rage and grieve? Can we quit rushing back into our ignorant superficial answers, arrogant assumptions, apathetic non-responses? 

Please? 

For the love of God and every one of those precious kids lying dead on their classroom floor, huddled around the bodies of their teachers who gave their lives trying to protect them, please? For the sake of every one of those kid’s parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, classmates and friends, please? And if not for them, for your own kids? Please?  

There is no nice, neat bow to tie this all up. I’m asking—begging—all of us just to sit with the questions, the pain, the deep unsettling, the destabilizing tension. As a Christian, I choose to believe that God will meet us there. That we don’t have to fear where the unsettling will lead. But first we have to be willing to endure it. And that’s the only hope I see for change .