Praying Because I Still Have Hope

The murders of nine Black people at Bible study is heartbreaking and horrific. Sadly, it’s not the worst part of the story.

As the news broke, a NYC businessman announced his run for the Presidency of the United States.  He did so while showing an embarrassing dearth of knowledge regarding international trade.  Instead of bothering to educate himself, his platform appeared to be based on xenophobia and character assassination, referring to “people with accents” answering call lines, and calling US Government officials “weak” and “stupid.”   In the week or so leading up to the murders, we saw the Twitterverse explode over some woman who appeared confused (or deliberately deceptive) about her racial identity; we saw a popular US vacation destination begin the systematic deportation and denial of rights of people who “look like” they are of African descent, we saw some people in an uproar over a person who decided they were in an inappropriately gendered body, and we saw, over and over again, attacks upon people of color – for being in swimming pools, for shopping, and for any number of real or imagined offenses. 

Like many (of my friends of color, anyway), I’m heartbroken over what I see.  I’m no longer looking at the violence of the acts; living in a city where a man killed his girlfriend and made her into soup which he then served to the homeless has shown me that human depravity and its accompanying physical violence can sink to unimaginable depths.  What concerns me more than the physical violence is the psychic and spiritual violence we continuously wreak upon each other and upon the world.  That, IMHO, is an even worse part of the story.

They say charity starts at home, so I’mma go there first.  We Americans are incredibly self-absorbed.  Get a group of us together and chances are you’ll find us sitting and peering down into our electronic devices rather than interacting with each other.  If we do find someone we like, the first thing we do is trade email addresses or figure out how to facebook each other.  Our norm for social interaction seems to have shifted from the personal to the electronic.  The unfortunate byproduct of this phenomenon is that, as Americans, we always want to do more.  We have access to more people and more information and so we go for quantity over quality.  In the process, it seems our intellectual capacities for critical thinking and our spiritual capacities for discernment have been significantly diminished.  Take any preposterous assertion, put it on the internet, and within 24 hours, someone will be running around repeating it as if it’s real.  Use popular music to create an image of African Americans as drug-using, gun-toting thugs, and abandon all empirical evidence to the contrary, and an alarming number of people become willing to believe it's real.  Religion is too hard or doesn’t make sense?  Don’t try to understand it; don’t try to change or grow spiritually – no.  Just abandon religion, make up your own, or simply embrace your spirituality, without ever bothering to check it or yourself or even to consider that maybe, just maybe, there is something outside the box you see.  

I’m rambling now because not only am I heartbroken, I’m incredibly pissed off.  The point I'm trying to make is that psychic violence is the result of our collective self-obsession to the exclusion of all else.  We sit back and celebrate this quasi-hedonistic culture we’ve created, then feign – surprise? Dismay? Disapproval? when someone selfishly takes it to a level we'd never imagined.  But isn't that the natural product of our culture?  Bigger, Better, More? 

If we have created  a culture in which people are not able to think critically, a culture in which people have neither spiritual discernment nor spiritual grounding, a culture in which the ultimate arbiter is not “how does this impact our world,” but “how does this make me feel?” then WHY are we surprised that some loser redneck decides to murder the black people they see as the source of their problems??  Have we not seen harbingers of this with the lunatic burning Qu’rans in Florida, the knuckleheads praying for the death of our President (and more recently, of Caitlyn Jenner) in Arizona?  When there is no public outcry over shootings of Sikhs at their temples, when we don't shut down the bikers who blasphemed Muslims at their temple on their Sabbath day, when we pay more attention to the color of a dress than we do to the fact that a popular vacation spot has begun to "ethnically cleanse" its country based on the colors of people's skin -- if we are overwhelmingly silent on those matters, then why are we now surprised that yet another crazy white terrorist has taken it upon themselves to eradicate the people of color he perceives as the source of his problems? This is how culture generates psychic, spiritual, and then physical violence.

We have SO much potential.  We humans are very diverse, and that can be quite beautiful.  Even though we have natural tendencies to group ourselves along real or imagined lines of demarcation, I believe human nature is to cooperate with and celebrate one another.  But somewhere along the way, we’ve learned to make enemies.  We’ve learned to assign values to physical characteristics, and to judge and group each other according to those values.  We’ve created so many gods that we’re unwilling or unable to recognize the Universal Divine God dwelling in all of us.

My prayer now is that we might begin to celebrate the God in all of us.  My prayer is that those of us who are people of faith will continue to pray to the God of our understanding, a God Who will allow our hearts, minds, and spirits to be opened to God’s Divine Presence.  It’s only within God’s Divine Presence that we can begin to heal our wounds, to respect our differences, and to truly love one another.   I pray that God's Divine Presence will comfort those who mourn, will calm those who are angered, and will heal those who are wounded in body, mind, and spirit.  I pray because recent events reveal the brutal reality that when we fail to turn back to God, our course leads to destruction.  There’s no other way, at least that I can see.  We’re too diverse, we have too many competing agendas – we can’t rank them or decide one is better than another; we have to learn to coexist lovingly and peacefully.

Despite all I see around me, despite recent events, I still have hope.  As long as Jesus is Alive, I will have hope.  While I’m Christian, I recognize that many people are not.  I also recognize that, since the beginning of time,  every major grouping of humans has had some form of the Golden Rule, some principle that says, as Jesus did, that we should love and treat our neighbors as we’d want to be treated.  My prayer is that we could all begin to come together on that one point, and then to lift up the good in one another.  Is that going to solve our problems?  No, of course not.  But it might begin to calm us down to a point where we can begin to work together towards preserving our planet and our human race.

If I were a better or more profound writer, or it my emotions were not engaged, I’d wrap this up with some memorable ending, but that ain’t in me right now.  I'm heartbroken, but I still have hope.  Right now, though,  all I can do is pray we will learn to live and act in love for one another.  Our lives and our planet depend on it.