God Not Guns Blog

I’m always a little apprehensive before a vigil. I worry about how we’re going to look, a small group of people, nowhere near a church, praying in a strange neighborhood or on a busy street where we obviously don’t belong. But we hold the vigils as a testament to the power of peace over violence. We hold them to lift up the life of the victim as a child of God and to pray for victim and perpetrator alike.

We pray for victim and perpetrator because we believe that to be human is to be created in the image of God – we are wonderfully made. To be human is to be connected to God – we are divinely made. To be human is to be created in goodness and blessed – we are mightily made. It is this connection to the divine and to each other that is desecrated in each act of gun violence.

I once heard violence defined as, “…that act of forgetting who we are; brothers and sisters of one another, each one of us a child of God. Violence can occur in those moments when we forget and deny our basic identity as God’s children, when we treat others as if they were worthless instead of priceless and cling to our own selfish desires, possessions and security. In the effort to claim our inheritance as loved children of God, we must claim our love for one another and choose life. We must remember who we are…”

Indeed it is time for us to remember who we are. As people of faith we must stand up and ask – What poverty of spirit causes Americans to so glorify their guns – in movies, on television, in video games, on the streets of our neighborhoods and in the halls of our Congress? It is time for us to awaken our country to the blasphemy of gun violence.

Our God is a God who said, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” When Charlton Heston held up a rifle at the NRA convention in Denver Colorado just weeks after the shootings at Columbine High School and shouted, ‘…from my cold, dead hands…’ he was making an idol of the gun. When our Congressional representatives give the gun industry immunity from prosecution, when they refuse to regulate guns as consumer products, when they refuse to enact gun laws such as the AWB that will save thousands of lives, when Congress does the bidding of the gun lobby in exchange for campaign dollars they are making an idol of the gun.

Idolatry of the gun seduces with false power and teases with illusive security. The idolatry of the gun make the American obsession with possession of guns seem like freedom when all it really offers is a life lived in fear. How can we see the face of God in every person or claim them as our brothers and sisters when we are so afraid that we think we must carry a concealed weapon everywhere we go? How can we stretch our arms wide towards God’s goodness when one hand is grasping a gun? How can we depend only on God when next to our hearts we’re wearing a weapon?

As people of faith we must stand witness to the destructive power of gun violence. We must say we will rely not on guns, but on God. We will affirm not guns, but life. We will bless not guns, but our common humanity. We must hold up a higher value saying that our children’s lives are a sacred trust and that human life is more important than the so-called right to bear arms.

Every time we hold a vigil we are standing up to violence. We are standing together black, brown and white, expressing our connection to each other and to the divine.

At our vigils we claim each other as brothers and sisters committed to the challenge of living peacefully in our homes and in our neighborhoods. Every time we hold a vigil we honor the lives lost to violence and remind ourselves and others that there is hope even in the face of the greatest of human evil.

It’s never easy to go to the site of a homicide. We never know what to expect. We don’t know who will be there, what someone might say, how we will be received. But somehow the most amazing thing always happens. Somehow the scene of a violent act becomes sacred space.

In honor of Mother's Day, I thought I'd tell you something about its founder - Julia Ward Howe. You may already know she wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," was an abolitionist and a tireless worker for women's right to vote along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. You may not know that she was also the founder of Mother's Day. But the Mother's Day envisioned by Julia Ward Howe was a far cry from the cards and roses, brunch and lunch kind of day we now celebrate.

Julia became a passionate voice for peace after witnessing the carnage of the American Civil War. In 1870, at the start of the Franco-Prussian War, she wrote a proclamation calling on the women of the world to unite for peace. She envisioned a national 'Mother's Day' which would bring the power and influence of women to bear in preventing the wars waged by men.

Today we are experiencing war of a different sort - that of gun violence on our own streets, in our own cities, and against our own children. The deaths at Virginia Tech, UNC, Auburn, Northern Illinois Universities, the deaths of children in drive-by shootings in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and other cities, the deaths of young black men killed by other young black men, the deaths of Amish girls in Pennsylvania are evidence of the carnage of our time. To stop the gun violence in our midst it's going to take the same kind of courage and passion that Julia Ward Howe had. That's why I think her Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870 is still relevant:

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have breasts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice." Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.