As I stood in line for the Sausalito ferry earlier this week, I looked around at kids and parents with their bikes, vacationing grey-haired folks, and young adults with backpacks. I listened to multiple languages being spoken around me, and I felt happy to be alive. And then suddenly, my thoughts shifted and I scanned the crowds again as if I was in search of a young man with an automatic weapon. Reality smacked me upside the head. We could be happy living our lives and then it could be violently over.
Many of you are also stunned by this week’s news. Why do we have more guns than people in the U.S.? The pundits aren’t helpful. I’m frustrated that we keep pointing to mental health as the issue, and ignoring all that leads a young man in this culture to violence. No one can predict violence. Even as a trained psychologist, I could not have predicted which clients would hurt themselves or others.
Whenever my clients were in emotional or mental stress I required them to remove weapons from their homes. Resistance arose, of course, but no one stopped therapy because of my request. Several of those clients and their family members thanked me afterward. Loved ones in those families had a right to feel safe and protected as did the client. I also think that we in the human family have a right to feel safe and protected.
It’s time that we all lend our voices and put pressure on our representatives to follow the Biblical mandate to beat swords into plowshares and give up the study of war. We also have an obligation to preach good news to those who are oppressed and to mourn with those who mourn. Our theology states that “racism, manifested as sin, plagues and hinders our relationship with Christ, in as much as it is antithetical to the gospel itself. We…affirm the ultimate and temporal worth of all persons.”
The gospel we claim is powerful, my friends. Find a way to take a stand and pray like crazy.
See you in church,
Karen
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