“Turning and turning in the widening gyre;
The Falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
--W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”
The worst part, perhaps, is our collective inability
to do something, to do anything.
About El Paso. About Dayton. I don’t even have to name what has brought infamy
and pain to these two American cities. We
know the all too familiar story by now. It was guns. It was hate. It was death.
It was awful, that awfulness magnified and multiplied now in the days
afterwards, when once again, chances are very good that in spite of everyone
who died and was injured, the trauma that will linger, the hearts broken wide
open….
Nothing will change.
Oh yes…the politicians will cry out for change. For
new laws or no laws or a curtailment of gun rights or a defense of gun rights
or increased mental health vigilance. The story of mass violence will be beaten
to death by the press, by our 24-hour non-stop media machine that in a weird
way lives for such events. It buries America under millions of words and
thousands of images and then lines up pundits and so-called “experts” to tell
us what to think and what to do.
Candidates for office and office holders have already
pounced on the news to assign blame. Too many guns. Too much hateful rhetoric
by the President. Too many mentally ill people with access to guns but little
or no access to decent and affordable mental health care. Too many spiritual platitudes about thoughts
and prayers. Too much hate speech and hate communities living in the dark
corners of the internet, festering in that cyber secret world, where the cranks
and the white supremacists and the aggrieved nurse their hatred to the point of
murder, mass murder.
What we don’t talk about, what we won’t talk about is
the deeper truth that America is in spiritual crisis. We are a country coming
apart at the seams, maybe even on the brink of anarchy. This crisis is not just
about our leaders. Not just about gun control or the second amendment. Not just
about those we elect to office, who collectively are unwilling to set aside
love of self and love of party to find common ground and actually govern, as we
need them to.
This is about the larger question of just who we are:
as a people, as a community, as children of God, we who share a common
geographic home but seem unable to remember anymore what is supposed to bind us
together as Americans. Our civic heritage is not supposed to be about violence
or hatred or distrust of the other or might makes right or every person for
themselves. That’s not the America I know and love. But that is the America too
many of us now experience in 2019. America as a place where folks are scared
and so we rightly wonder and worry just how it all might all end.
The spiritual writer leader Marianne Williamson is a
candidate for president and many in the press and culture dismiss her as a
crackpot, completely out of place on the stage with all those career
politicians. But in the last debate she named what ails America. In her words,
it is “...the dark underbelly of American society, the racism, the bigotry…this
dark psychic force of the collectivized hatred…in this country.”
This past weekend I actually missed the news about
Dayton and El Paso because I was with almost ten thousand people who were laser
focused on just one goal: to make this world a more loving and merciful place.
Folks like bicycle riders, and volunteers, and cancer survivors, and cheering
neighbors and friends: we all worked together, and all to find a cure for
cancer. To help the sick and the dying. To comfort the mourning. To stand for
hope, together, as one community.
I’m not naive enough to believe that an event like the
Pan Mass Challenge ride, which will raise more than $60 million for cancer care
and research…that it alone can stem the rising tide of hate in America. Yet it still
gives me hope, because it teaches me that the answer to America’s spiritual
crisis and America’s spiritual poverty is finally love.
Love in action. Love for neighbor, all neighbors, not
just the ones who are your mirror image. The answer to the dark forces at work
in America are the values that make America, America. Freedom. Justice. Fair
play. Compassion. Mercy for the hurting. Welcome to the stranger. Safety and
security on our streets and in our homes and where we worship.
And love. Always, always, love. And if we don’t love?
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, The
ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the
worst, Are full of passionate intensity.”
(W.B. Yeats)
We can love. We can hate. We can work each day to
bring hope into the world. We can succumb to cynicism and lash out. We can arm ourselves to the teeth. We can arm ourselves with non-violence.
The crisis is real. To love or to hate. What will it
be America?
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