Today is a National Day of Mourning for the Connecticut.victims. Bishop Sprong wrote this and I can think of nothing else that I have read this past week that brings more meaning to this tragedy.
A CHRISTMAS LETTER TO MY READERS:
Dear Friends,
The images of this past weekend collide in my brain this holiday season in a violent and cacophonous way. I have the mental picture of children, six and seven years of age, piled up in the corner of a school room riddled with bullets from a civilian version of the M-16 rifle used by our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. No child in this mental picture received less than three bullets, some of them received as many as eleven. In the pile of carnage with them were their teachers. Down the hall were the bullet riddled bodies of their principal and their guidance counselor. Twenty children, twelve girls, eight boys, and six adults, all women, the youngest 27, the oldest 56, were dead.
On Sunday I was in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey for worship. It was pageant Sunday and the church was filled with children costumed as angels, shepherds, wise men and even as lambs, donkeys, cows and camels walking on four legs. King Herod, who was about seven with his crown in place, directed our attention to Bethlehem. Then we heard the familiar story of the presence of God being experienced in the life of a helpless baby, a dependent child. We listened to the narrative in which the “Holy” was found in the vulnerability of an infant, who was subjected to the dangers of human existence. Our gifted rector, Janet Broderick, spoke to the children about their fears, the pain that life inflicts. She did not hand out panaceas or cheap grace. She did not seek to dull the pain we were feeling with rosy pictures of heavenly bliss now being enjoyed by the victims, nor did she delude us with the idea that twenty-six new stars are now shining in the sky. Instead she let us feel the trauma of the Newtown shooting, the human situation where no one is ever completely safe and the fact that we must embrace and live with these exigencies of human existence. Her message was not “God will take care of you,” for clearly God did not take care of these Connecticut children, but rather that God is with you, God is in you, so have courage, live life fully each day, love wastefully, to all that each of us can be and make every moment count as if it is part of eternity.
I looked at the faces of those children in my church last Sunday. They had embraced the horror of the Newtown shooting. Yet, they set it aside momentarily to bask in the glow of knowing that they were performing and were appreciated and loved by their audience. Every parent, however, held his or her child a bit more tightly, a little longer than usual, and much more poignantly. I looked around at the faces of those in that congregation that I know so well. I saw a number of people who had recently lost their spouses. They were both elderly and young. They were black and white. Their losses were six months ago, three months ago, three weeks ago. I looked at the faces of parents with whom I have walked when they lost their children to sickness, to accidents, or to the violence of the natural world.
In that congregation on Sunday we prayed not for the security that life will never possess, but for an enlarged capacity to live, a greater ability to love. We prayed not for the absence of pain and hurt, but to be enabled to share in a peace that transcends pain and hurt, the peace that passes understanding. It is not peace “as the world gives.”
I then went over in my mind the arguments heard so often in America’s political gun law debates. “To limit a citizen’s access to own legally any sort of weapon is an infringement on their freedom.” Twenty-six people in a single school in Connecticut have had their freedom dramatically ended by a legally owned weapon! “The constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms.” Does that constitutional guarantee allow anyone the right to bear assault weapons? “The reason guns need to have an expanded magazine for rapid firing is that in target practice it takes too long to reload after every shot.” Does that minor inconvenience override the worth of a single child whose life is snuffed out by a barrage of fire power designed to stop an advancing army? How long will we continue to allow the paranoia of a few to endanger the lives of the many? Can this nation, which was born in a new world with a frontier that had to be tamed, get over the gun obsession that we have incorporated into our national psyche and ever grow up to recognize that the frontier is not there any longer, but that we have become a large interdependent society of diverse people, where all of us must temper our individual desires for the sake of the well-being of the whole? We do that in thousands of ways already. We drive on the right side of the street, we stop on red and go on green, we have rules about who can drive and we take licenses away when the privilege of driving has been violated. Is it too much to think that we must ban once and for all the personal ownership and use of weapons designed for mass murder, prosecute those who sell or possess arms illegally and close the loopholes that now exist in background checks for all gun owners? When does a person’s right to carry fire arms conflict with another person’s right to live without fear of violence?
As the Christmas season is celebrated, we see the smiles on our children’s faces, but we also remember those bullet-filled bodies in Connecticut. We hear the message of peace on earth, but we also remember to the shame in our unwillingness to act politically to make our children safe. It is not just our children, we need to recognize that we also did not make safe Representative Gabby Gifford of Arizona, nor did we make safe our own political leaders like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Malcolm X. Do we want to be a society where children are at risk and where political debate is decided with the use of guns? Is that responsible citizenship? Is that a faithful way to be followers of the one we call the Prince of Peace?
A blessed Christmas to you all.
~John Shelby Spong
On Sunday I was in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey for worship. It was pageant Sunday and the church was filled with children costumed as angels, shepherds, wise men and even as lambs, donkeys, cows and camels walking on four legs. King Herod, who was about seven with his crown in place, directed our attention to Bethlehem. Then we heard the familiar story of the presence of God being experienced in the life of a helpless baby, a dependent child. We listened to the narrative in which the “Holy” was found in the vulnerability of an infant, who was subjected to the dangers of human existence. Our gifted rector, Janet Broderick, spoke to the children about their fears, the pain that life inflicts. She did not hand out panaceas or cheap grace. She did not seek to dull the pain we were feeling with rosy pictures of heavenly bliss now being enjoyed by the victims, nor did she delude us with the idea that twenty-six new stars are now shining in the sky. Instead she let us feel the trauma of the Newtown shooting, the human situation where no one is ever completely safe and the fact that we must embrace and live with these exigencies of human existence. Her message was not “God will take care of you,” for clearly God did not take care of these Connecticut children, but rather that God is with you, God is in you, so have courage, live life fully each day, love wastefully, to all that each of us can be and make every moment count as if it is part of eternity.
I looked at the faces of those children in my church last Sunday. They had embraced the horror of the Newtown shooting. Yet, they set it aside momentarily to bask in the glow of knowing that they were performing and were appreciated and loved by their audience. Every parent, however, held his or her child a bit more tightly, a little longer than usual, and much more poignantly. I looked around at the faces of those in that congregation that I know so well. I saw a number of people who had recently lost their spouses. They were both elderly and young. They were black and white. Their losses were six months ago, three months ago, three weeks ago. I looked at the faces of parents with whom I have walked when they lost their children to sickness, to accidents, or to the violence of the natural world.
In that congregation on Sunday we prayed not for the security that life will never possess, but for an enlarged capacity to live, a greater ability to love. We prayed not for the absence of pain and hurt, but to be enabled to share in a peace that transcends pain and hurt, the peace that passes understanding. It is not peace “as the world gives.”
I then went over in my mind the arguments heard so often in America’s political gun law debates. “To limit a citizen’s access to own legally any sort of weapon is an infringement on their freedom.” Twenty-six people in a single school in Connecticut have had their freedom dramatically ended by a legally owned weapon! “The constitution guarantees us the right to bear arms.” Does that constitutional guarantee allow anyone the right to bear assault weapons? “The reason guns need to have an expanded magazine for rapid firing is that in target practice it takes too long to reload after every shot.” Does that minor inconvenience override the worth of a single child whose life is snuffed out by a barrage of fire power designed to stop an advancing army? How long will we continue to allow the paranoia of a few to endanger the lives of the many? Can this nation, which was born in a new world with a frontier that had to be tamed, get over the gun obsession that we have incorporated into our national psyche and ever grow up to recognize that the frontier is not there any longer, but that we have become a large interdependent society of diverse people, where all of us must temper our individual desires for the sake of the well-being of the whole? We do that in thousands of ways already. We drive on the right side of the street, we stop on red and go on green, we have rules about who can drive and we take licenses away when the privilege of driving has been violated. Is it too much to think that we must ban once and for all the personal ownership and use of weapons designed for mass murder, prosecute those who sell or possess arms illegally and close the loopholes that now exist in background checks for all gun owners? When does a person’s right to carry fire arms conflict with another person’s right to live without fear of violence?
As the Christmas season is celebrated, we see the smiles on our children’s faces, but we also remember those bullet-filled bodies in Connecticut. We hear the message of peace on earth, but we also remember to the shame in our unwillingness to act politically to make our children safe. It is not just our children, we need to recognize that we also did not make safe Representative Gabby Gifford of Arizona, nor did we make safe our own political leaders like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George Wallace and Malcolm X. Do we want to be a society where children are at risk and where political debate is decided with the use of guns? Is that responsible citizenship? Is that a faithful way to be followers of the one we call the Prince of Peace?
A blessed Christmas to you all.
~John Shelby Spong
IN MEMORIAM
Charlotte Brown, 6
Grace McDonnell, 7
Daniel Barden, 7
Ann Marie Murphy, 52
Rachel Davino, 29
Emilie Parker, 6
Olivia Engle, 6
Jack Pinto, 6
Josephine Gay, 7
Noah Pozner, 6
Ana Marques-Greene, 6
Caroline Previdi, 6
Dylan Hockley, 6
Jessica Rekos, 6
Dawn Hochsprung, 47
Avielle Richman, 6
Madeleine Hsu, 6
Lauren Rousseau, 30
Catherine Hubbard, 6
Mary Sherlach, 56
Chase Kowalski
Victoria Soto, 27
Nancy Lanza, 52
Benjamin Wheeler, 6
Jesse Lewis, 6
Allison Wyatt, 6
James Mattioli, 6
Amen.
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