I heard the news of the
church shooting in Charleston while in France to pray with the community at
Taize. It was a particularly bittersweet day.
It had been a breath taking
experience with the world at prayer at Taize, 2000 people singing, chanting and
praying in their own languages and in four part harmony, the universal language
of music. But one of the prayers the community offered that morning was for the
victims of the shootings I had learned of just the night before.
I had found the BBC on the French cable in my hotel room to catch up on the news before beginning my long journey home. The horrific news out of Charleston would make my stomach turn and chill my heart. It would give me the same kind of cognitive dissonance I heard from many Americans living in Europe: I know America is home but do I really want to go back to that place?
I had found the BBC on the French cable in my hotel room to catch up on the news before beginning my long journey home. The horrific news out of Charleston would make my stomach turn and chill my heart. It would give me the same kind of cognitive dissonance I heard from many Americans living in Europe: I know America is home but do I really want to go back to that place?
A Calloused Heart
At some level I suppose I
have grown callous about these things, like many of my countrymen and women. On
the one hand, I respond in horror to the latest atrocity, this one committed in
a house of prayer. On the other, I experience a sad resignation to the fact that
enduring such atrocities increasingly seem to be the cost one must be willing
to pay as a condition of living in America.
I am sure such resignation
provides the public relations wing of the world’s largest gun industry a great delight
to know their efforts to spin such events as expectable, just the way things
are, have met with such success.
We are an adolescent culture
with a teenaged obsession over rights and freedom from any kind of regulation,
an adolescence fed by an infantilizing consumerist culture and an opportunistic
political culture only too willing to pitch their appeals to our lowest levels
of moral reasoning. Our culture has yet to mature into adulthood, accepting the
duties to others that come with the exercise of any true rights. When a right is
exercised without regard for how it impacts others it is little more than an
arbitrary privilege and almost inevitably occurs at the expense of someone else.
“What the Hell is wrong with the Americans?”
The chatter around me in the
cafes of Geneva that evening and in the airport restaurant in Montreal the next
day during my layover there revealed a decidedly different view of this event.
The common theme of the reactions was simply “What in the hell is wrong with the Americans?”
My sense is that America is
seen in the parts of Europe I visited (Switzerland, France, Scotland and
Britain) with a mixture of admiration and fear. The Europeans have hardly lost
sight of America’s role in helping Europe deliver itself from the authoritarian
regimes of both the right (Nazi Germany) and the left (Soviet Russia) in the 20th
CE. And the products of the American culture industry dominate the European
imagination as the huge, inescapable megatron previews of Jurassic World in the Glasgow train station evidenced.
But they also view the
world’s only remaining superpower with apprehension, both from the ever
tightening grasp of its finance and global corporate talons as well as from an
armed forces larger than the next seven nations combined with knee jerk tendencies to
employ force as its first response rather than its last resort.
That’s why events like
Charleston spook the world outside our borders. How can a nation with such high
flung ideals of equality, liberty and justice for all – not to mention so much
power - be the matrix for a relentless parade
of xenophobic, hate-fueled events like the slaughter of vulnerable people of
faith who accepted their killer into their midst in good faith? And how can any
modern nation-state watch this latest incidence of public slaughters occur
without the exercise of even a modicum of social responsibility?
When the world’s greatest
superpower proves unable or unwilling to protect its own most vulnerable
citizens from preventable harm, how can it be trusted with the welfare of the
rest of the world it dominates?
Wrestling with our souls
At the early service at my
parish Sunday, the priest informed the congregation that the bishop of the
diocese had issued a statement on Charleston in conjunction with his fellow bishops in
the Episcopal Church. The statement asked parishioners to contact their local
AME church to express their sorrow, to remember the dead and their survivors in
their personal prayers this week, and finally to use the Prayer Attributed to
St. Francis in the worship services of all parishes during the week.
He is to be commended for
this forthright response.
Of course, St. Francis
himself did not write this famous prayer that often is thought to be his. The
prayer dates to an early 20th CE French religious journal but its
elements of selfless love of others and its call to work for justice and peace
have made it a prayer routinely used by Franciscan orders and evinces the
spirit of Francis and Claire.
Sunday those words seemed
most appropriate:
Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is
hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord,
union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there
is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to
console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is
in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is
in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
The events of Charleston
have presented us with much hatred to be overcome with love. They reveal long,
festering injuries in desperate need of pardon and have caused deep sadness
over losses that will never completely heal.
That is why it is important
to be intentional about thinking about these events, naming them for the evils they
represent. More importantly, our commitment to be in solidarity with the victims
of these events and their survivors charges all of us with the wrestling with
our own souls that will be necessary to change the conditions that give rise to
this and all the other atrocities that Americans like me have come to take for
granted.
There is much darkness to
overcome with light indeed. That begins with acknowledging our weariness of
this endless parade of senseless violence and the callousness of our own hearts
it engenders.
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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., M.Div., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Professed: Third Order Society of St. Francis (TSSF)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined
life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious
or political, is not worth holding.
Most things of
value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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