Reflections on a Church shooting – (This one happened to be in a Liberal Church)

How many different feelings did you experience when you first heard about the shooting during the worship service and children’s play at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church? And how did those feelings modify when you found out that at least a part of the gunman’s motivation was because these liberal people had supported the creation of a culture of liberalism that had destroyed the country?

Anger, astonishment, fear, outrage, sadness, confusion? I experienced all of these. In the midst of all that emotion, I feel a need to write about this event in a way that can provide more light, not more heat. So let me set my handy flame thrower aside. To that end, I at least have to name some of the paths that I could potentially go down, but that I will not actually follow.

So, here’s what I will not do:

• I will not add to the rant about how all the right wing writers (Coulter, Savage, Hannity, O’Reilly, etc.) have created an atmosphere that encourages the “crazies” to act out violently against the enemies they have been taught to hate.
• I will not add to the very real fear that so many people have today about the danger of taking a controversial social stand. I sometimes wonder if someone will bring a gun into my liberal congregation? No, I said I wouldn’t go there either.
• I will not respond to those on the other end of the religious spectrum about how their image of a punitive (and potentially destructive) god strangely validates human acts of self-righteous destruction, though it’s mighty tempting to do just that.
• In fact, I won’t get drawn into the debates about who is to blame for this tragedy.
• Nor will I try to create a false sense of safety for myself or others by categorizing the gunman as an anomaly whose reprehensible behavior has nothing to do with other elements of society.

Itemizing how I will not add to the heat of the discussion is the easy part. A much harder task is to find something that might actually bring light to the issue.

So, I guess I’ll begin by itemizing a few statements that I believe to be true:

• Life is dangerous – life is always dangerous.
• Life’s choices always involve trade-offs, or said differently, All choices have a set of consequences that usually includes some things we like and some things we don’t like.
• Thinking clearly is hard because most, if not all, truth is paradoxical!
• All motivations for human behavior boil down to some combination of fear and love. OK, that one doesn’t seem so obvious, but I still believe it is true.

After all that casting about to find an angle, I am left with two pieces of useful perspective.

I am enormously sad for the victims and families and friends of the victims of that shooting. I join them in their grief, but I am even sadder to live in a culture that has found so many ways to encourage violence as the answer to life’s problems. I can find no evidence that violence does anything other than set the stage for more violence. Violent acts might create a temporary illusion that a person is acting from a position of strength, but that’s not true and it doesn’t last.

If what I wrote earlier is true (that fear and love are life’s primary behavioral motivators) then we have a choice between acting in a way that promotes fear or in a way that promotes love.

I see nothing in the central message of Jesus Christ that is designed to promote fear (unless you believe in a violent and punitive God) – only love. The love I have in mind is not the “nice-nice” variety. Real love is grounded in honesty, even when that honesty is energized by legitimate anger (the kind that can be expressed in words or creative action, not violence). The love Jesus brings is based in God’s deepest caring for the well being of all people, and even for the rest of creation. I hate to see suffering in people I love, even when that suffering appears to be self-generated. And I get angry in the face of systemic injustice. Such anger motivates acts of love, not violence.

I could write a whole book on the behaviors and stances that individuals and religious organizations could practice that would promote love, but that is beyond the scope of this blog. Let me say this much: The news/entertainment/political complex uses name-calling as its primary fuel. There is no way that name-calling can promote love, but there are lots of ways that it can promote fear – and, too often, violence. So let’s stop it. At least let’s stop contributing to it.

And let’s learn to listen compassionately to one another. If we only love those who are our friends, then we necessarily contribute to the vilification of our enemies. Healthy Liberal Christianity takes Jesus’ mandate to “love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us” very seriously. It won’t feel good like revenge is supposed to. It won’t help us pat ourselves on the back because we’re right and our enemies are wrong. But it might extract out of a violent culture a little bit of the very venom that keeps the violence going. And that is worth a lot.

Wayne
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