This week, 45 men, women, children, and elderly were killed as the result of an Israeli air strike bringing the Palestinian death count to over 36,000 souls.
This week, a former GOP presidential candidate and United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley shared gleefully, proudly, and unashamedly, an image of herself writing “finish them” on an Israeli army artillery shell.
This week we have all borne witness to literal hell on earth.
So, I don’t imagine our tiny congregation in Houston, Tx was alone this week as we sat around our living room Wednesday night and each shared honest feelings of despair, anger, frustration, and pain. As we all read a passage about a God who supposedly lifts the needy from garbage dumps*, we surely were not the only to responded with the only available words for a God like that this week:
“do you?”
This week has wreaked havoc on not only the collective experience of this life we share and this world we all struggle to call our “home”, but also upon so many of our already tender and fragile beliefs about God.
Fair warning, the rest of the words written here in this space are not intended to ease that or change that. No, these words are rather intended to give us the boldness to name that.
Church, we are, we should be, we better be grieving.
We are in midst of intense levels of denial, of anger, of bargaining, and depression. We are both witnessing and experiencing each one and then another and yet another all within the same week, the same day, even at times within the same hour.
We are not okay. We damn well shouldn’t be.
And what this pastoral heart longs to speak into both my own faith family as well as the broader family of faith in this moment of collective agony is simply this:
Brothers and sisters, let’s please take care of each other.
Making space for hard emotions means making space for all the hard emotions
Let me start this section by making one thing unequivocally clear: not responding is not an option. To remain apathetic, impartial, unmoved, or silent in the midst of injustices, especially of this scale, is truly not even an avenue I want to entertain for more than a paragraph. Feeling something, having some sort of response, that is step one. That is the bare minimum. It is what we do with those responses, how we care for each other in the midst of them that weighs heavy on my heart in this moment.
While some of us may be feeling hostile and resentful, others of us are feeling forgotten and abandoned. For some us lashing out in rage or voicing our hostility feels like what our body needs to do. For others, it’s crying out our powerlessness, taking gentle breaths to see us through our panic or even giving voice to our feeling undervalued. We are experiencing a collective disappointment, disillusionment, and weariness from all fronts right now. And we are all going to experience that differently. We have to give each other the space, the compassion, and the mercy to walk through the reality of those experiences, together.
One’s hostility does not get to trump another’s panic.
One’s furry does not get to burn out another’s fears.
One’s numbness cannot quench another’s overwhelm.
One’s tears cannot drown out another’s motivated furiousness.
Bearing with one another means bearing with the complexity, the difficulty, and the diversity of emotions that evil stirs up within us. Anyone can remain united in the midst of peace and fulfillment. Narrow is the way that can find unity amidst sorrow, despair, and injustice.
We must strive to see beyond the red, to see first the humanity within one another and the image of the God we cry out to that is crying out through each of us. Within that collective cry there is anger, there is sadness, there is fear, there is shock, there is disgust, there is a loss for words. And there is room for all of it in the midst of this collective grieving.
What if our hope amidst horror is found in the way we hold each other?
It is in the midst of hopeless times like these that I most look toward the margins of historic faith to learn from those who were nearest to suffering, injustice, and cruelty and yet, remained nearer still to the ways and means of Jesus. Reading the words of Oscar Romero, Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo, René Padilla, Cesar Chavez, and MLK, including his learnings from Mahatma Gandhi, it assures me both that our current confronting and wreckoning with monstrosities that leave us in horror is not new and simply bonds us to the consistent theme of our own history, and also it humbles me in recognizing that every single one of these men and women shared a commitment to non-violence in the midst of each of their faithful endeavors.
And to be clear, what humbles me most about that is not the piety that non-violence appears to suggest, but rather, it is their reasons for remaining non-violent that I believe King explains well here:
The nonviolent approach does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect. It calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.
-Martin Luther King Jr.
This is what I have learned most in learning from those civil rights, social justice, and liberation activists that bore the identity as “Christ follower.” They recognized that how we respond to injustice shapes us just as much, if not more, as anything we seek to shape or impact in our endeavors against injustice. They knew that one does not shape without in turn being shaped. That service being a spiritual discipline means how we seek to serve will impact our spirits just as it much as it will impact the world. How we hold each other, how we speak to each other, how we respond to one another’s groanings, therein lies the hope of any and every call to action.
It’s how they kept going. While yes, ultimate liberation, restoration, and justice were all of their ultimate goals in view, they recognized that it was too their fighting for liberation, their working together for restoration, their never tiring to see justice done that were all equally as valuable “wins” in the Kingdom of Heaven. It was not just their victories against injustice, but also their fighting against injustice that was the work of God. So long as that fight reflected, cultivated, mirrored, and shared the character of God.
We must not trample each other on the way to tearing down evil.
For it will be the running together, the continued glimpses of the goodness within each other’s humanity, the endless assurances from one another that love has not died, the self-created promises that kindness and gentleness are more powerful than we realize— such will see us through this long and tiring journey that is the restoration of all things.
We must fight to protect our own souls by protecting one another in the fight for the protection of all.
We must fight to see each other.
We must fight to care for each other.
We must fight to stay human, to stay soft, thoughtful, and kind.
No fight for humanity is worth the cost of losing our own along the way.
*Psalm 113:7 “He lifts the poor from the dust and the needy from the garbage dump.” (NLT version)