Like everyone else my age, I remember where I was when I heard about the assassination of President Kennedy; the fourth grade classroom at Red Bank Elementary School in Claudville, VA. It was, for me, the beginning of the end of innocence. Until that time I lived in a warm little bubble of family and friends and school and church. Almost everyone I knew (except my evil older brother) was good to me and everywhere I went I felt safe. But a man with a gun and a problem shattered my world.
In the years since there have been many people (mostly male) with guns and problems. And they all seemed to think that the guns were the solution to their problems; or at least a way to scream into the dark night of their despair with a voice certain to be heard. The list is long. There have been very public shootings like Martin Luther King, Jr., way, way too many school shootings, and three in the last week (April 13-20) - 1) a teen-age boy knocking on the wrong door in Kansas City, 2) a young woman and her friends in the wrong driveway in rural New York, and 3) a high-school cheerleader getting in the wrong car in Texas. Over the years there have been other gun deaths that were very personal and private; relatives and friends and parishioners who thought that their only way out of their particular problem was a gun fired at themselves or others.
It is because of these many personal occasions that I am not quick to dismiss the more distant, public events on TV as awful things that frighten but do not affect me. As the poet John Donne said, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” No, we are not islands, living out our lives secure behind out actual or metaphorical locked gates. We are connected to one another in more ways than most of us can count, and in answer to Cain’s rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” we are impelled to answer, “Well yes, actually we are.” As people who are called by God to live responsibly in relation to one another, it is our Christian duty to do our very best to care for our community and our country.
As a nation, we have a problem. In particular, we have a gun problem. There are certain people who simply do not need to have access to guns. For whatever reason, the system we have now is not working in keeping guns out of the wrong people’s hands. I invite you to join me in praying, and thinking, and working on ways to help this community and this country deal with this very serious problem. I have no solutions to offer, only a belief that, with God’s help and a firm resolve, we can find a way to step back from running off the edge of this societal cliff.
Peace, Delmer