A couple weeks ago I watched as news reports and social media exploded with one more school shooting this time in LA county. A couple students were still listed as in critical condition and others having their wounds tended to. All of this happening just afters two other school shootings happened last week. A 16-year-old boy was charged with opening fire at a Texas school wounding a teenage girl and a 15-year-old boy was charged with firing a gun in his Kentucky high school killing two students and wounding 18 other people.
It’s shocking to see the amount of violence that has taken place in just a year in regard to these shootings. In just this month of November 2019 there have been 19 public mass shootings alone and the list of others is daunting to count (see link). But as I watched the responses to this on social media from the Christian demographic I was a bit let down. There responses were as follows:
“This world is not our home.”
“Prayer sent to the families affected. Those poor kids are in a better place now.”
“Jesus come soon, take us away.”
There were many others but I think you see the theme. In the face of catastrophe there is a religious demographic that has a programed response to pain. This response comes from years of doctrines that revolve around escaping this world. Dogmas that taunt that this world is not our home– there is a better place waiting. It’s rooted in a desire to escape to white pearly gates, mansions, and promises of a Roman-esque after life.
The only problem though is that that kind of worldview is absolutely unhelpful to our current lives now.
A message that someday we’ll escape doesn’t actually bring healing to a family experiencing deep loss.
The quick bumper sticker comments that this world is not our home creates more feelings of pain and potential resentment.
Your prayers fall on deaf ears when the school children need something far more tangible.
So, what DO we NEED? What would be helpful in the middle of all of this pain and violence? It’s easy to critique online comments, but what is the solution?
I believe ONE of the ways to navigate all of this should start between our ears– right there in the mind.
Some of my favorite cultural movers and shakers all seemed to have holy imaginations that were deeply rooted in a present hope.
John Lennon’s song Imagine paints a beautiful picture of what he and his band mates desired for the future. He writes:
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
Lennon saw a place where there was nothing that separates us, nothing to kill for, a present kind of reality where we can live in peace. His message mirrored that of Jesus who clearly believed there could be a time and place where there was neither Jew nor Gentile. And get this; before his death he was quoted saying that he deeply believed change had the potential of happening during his lifetime.
Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and countless others shared visions of a present reality where violence was exchanged for love, forgiveness, peace– a kingdom come reality.
But, and it’s a fairly painful conjunction; there dreams weren’t experienced during their lifetimes and some might argue still haven’t.
Does this make their messages less true? Should we leave these hopeful mantras behind and begin waving our surrender flags and begin carrying the dogmatic nihilistic messages that it’s all going to burn anyway so why bother?
Here’s my simple response which I would argue mirrors those of Jesus and other wisdom teachers.
We have a choice in the middle of pain and catastrophe. We can begin losing hope or putting stock in escapist theories removing us from the present or we can choose to use our energy toward something more restorative.
Your energy is going to be used for one or the other– so why not imagine something positive?
What if a whole generation of people chose to, in the middle of pain, chose to imagined restorative actions, healing, repair, and rather than imagining it happening far away why not here and now?
Worse case scenario is that nothing changes. And IF nothing changes then we are in no different of a place than we’d have been had we touted the escapist, nihilist narratives.
But
Best case scenario is that our positive hopes for the present and future cause a change. They give hope wings and we slowly begin seeing the kind of change that would make THIS PLACE heaven on earth.
For me lately, I’m choosing to write a better narrative. In the words of poet David Wilcox I’m choosing to allow:
Love to make the mortar
love to stack these stones
And it’s love who made the stage here
Although it looks like we’re alone
In this scene set in shadows
Like the night is here to stay
There is evil cast around us
But it’s love that wrote the play
For in this darkness love can show the way
When these evil moments happen what if we chose to aim our imaginations and energy at finding solutions and healing NOW? And what if the engine driving it was not a future destruction and escape, rather; the engine is a hopeful belief that life CAN and WILL be better now and into eternity?