Trip Wires & Tragedy

The challenge begins with the first word we speak. What word do we speak? Gun violence? Freedom?  The absence of the capacity for discourse? Empathy? Hate? Human dignity? Hypocrisy? (Whose?) 

Lament? 

What words are we to speak? 

To speak a first word is to trip, inevitably, an invisible wire we did not set. To risk identification with and placement in a camp of opposition. Whose foundations were laid long ago, in anticipation of our violation. Whose rebuttals to whatever response one might offer are already written. Because nuance makes a lousy meme. Because to speak is to reveal the necessary selectivity of both society's outrage and compassion.

Perhaps not obviously, silence is an option, but silence has costs and associated trip wires, too, especially if we have spoken or not spoken before. Just whose side are you on? Reminder that society decries our echo chambers while militantly enforcing them. Reminder that we are still grappling with the implications of Pythagoras, reluctant inhabitants of a world that does not, in fact, have sides. Not that we don't take them. Or devour each other with them. The proof of their existence is not their visibility but their capacity to destroy what is real and visible and true.  

Who will rescue us from this body of death?

The seemingly safest thing to say right now is that political violence is never justified. This is unquestionably true. Both Democrats and Republicans have said as much out loud! Given this rarest of agreements, does it risk my exile to an un-nuanced camp to wonder when violence is ever not political? 

To ask if violence is ever not political is to wonder if violence is ever not a definitionally destructive - if arguably justified and necessary - enforcement of a people's, or individual's, ideals for who belongs to the belonging we share and how. The stuff of politics. 

To ask if violence is ever not political is to pray that bipartisan agreement for the protection and flourishing of certain lives against political violence would not be limited to those in closest proximity to power and wealth. To wonder in this way is to seek to be faithful to my faith tradition, whose recurring concern when it comes to political power, in obedience to our Savior, is notice of, and care for, "the least of these, my sisters and brothers" (Mt 25:40).

If the world is a sphere, without sides, our commitment to the least of these would have us hold a posture open to discovering those at risk of being trampled underfoot, no matter the "side" that brings the marginalization to our attention. The cause of the migrant and the military veteran, if one takes them to be "sided," belonging to one love. And our response to this discovery, from whomever we received it, would be not resentment, but thanksgiving. For we would given the gift of seeing in new ways how, as St. Anthony put it, "our life and death is with our neighbor."

I think the result of lives committed to such a posture would be lives at odds with the logic of silos. Beware of predictable lives! So, a friend tells me about his colleague who is a Christian pacifist and military chaplain. "But," the colleague is frequently asked, "how can you hold those two positions with integrity?" To which he replies, "Friend, to be a chaplain is the only I know how to hold both positions with integrity." In a way that is instructive for our current moment, the chaplain refuses to let his position become the justification for forsaking his belonging to his neighbor. Whether he knows it or not, the chaplain has become a witness to the new logic of the kingdom of God.

In days ahead, if you don't like the question the world invites you to answer, refuse it. Be a parable whose life insists that more is possible.

We belong to each other. We commit to listen to and learn from each other. We look around for the "others" who aren't at the table where the listening and learning is happening, and we wait for them, too.  We imagine a future that makes room for all. And the fruit of that future is a love that more clearly reflects the love of our Savior, which is love whose joy is that we would know it, by our extending it to one another, not only across the aisle, but under, over, and around it, too.