Finding light

I’ve hesitated to post anything else about the shootings in Connecticut last Friday, because I don’t really have any words.  I didn’t write over the weekend; I was considering carefully about how to put into words what was going on in my mind.  The most I could do was respond yesterday to the viral blog post “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother.”  The truth is that I’ve found myself mostly reacting to the reactions.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s what I often do here on my blog: I respond to the things that come out of Christian (particularly conservative evangelical) culture.  So that’s what I’m going to do today.

This morning, I finally finished catching up on emails and blog posts that have come out since Friday.  I read this fantastic post over on Rachel Held Evans’ blog that sums up very well what I’ve been saying since Friday.  (Our pastor had a very similar message in church on Sunday.)  There’s been a lot of talk, particularly on Facebook, about how we as a nation have gotten so far away from being “God-centered” that this kind of tragedy can happen.  The buzz usually goes in one of these directions:

• We abandoned (or “kicked out”) God, so He’s left us to wallow in our evil.
• We took God out of our schools, so He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) intervene in a place He “wasn’t allowed.”
• We are no longer following God (in our schools or our homes or our government), so He’s punishing us.

I’ve heard and read a lot of discussion on this—on blogs, on Twitter, on Facebook.  Nearly everyone who believes one of the above is also firm in his or her belief that the United States used to be a nation of “Christian values” but that we’ve strayed from that and fostered an environment where great evil can occur, including causing the shooter to become a person who can kill children.

Nice try, but it’s not true.

I have two separate thoughts on that.  First, we’re not any less godly as a nation as we ever were.  The difference is that we’re more honest about it than we used to be.  If one really takes a hard look at our history (butchering native peoples, enslaving Africans, and marginalizing immigrants, for starters), it doesn’t look so good in the “Christian nation” department.  I’m not suggesting that we fixate on the negative or that nothing good has come out of our country.  On the contrary, I love being a United States citizen.  But I’m deeply ashamed of our past, and I’m horrified that much of the evils for which we were responsible were done in the name of Jesus.  It’s entirely irresponsible to look at our past and think that we can learn how to be more “godly” from behaving in the same manner as people did back then.  All we’ve done is traded those evils for new ones.

Second, why are we only ready to talk about how “ungodly” we’ve become when a person shoots up a school or a movie theater?  Where is the outrage in the horrors that happen every day?  Where is the anger and the cry for justice over the 11-year-old who was gang raped by 18 men?  We go ballistic over one man whose history we don’t know, but I’ll bet that almost no one reading this blog post even knew about the story I just linked.  Not only that, we don’t start blaming the ban on public school prayer for domestic violence, child abuse, rape, or singleton murders.  We either (correctly) blame the abuser/rapist/murderer or we (incorrectly) blame the victim.  But we don’t blame our “godless” society.

In the last several days, what I’ve seen leads me to believe that this is just another facet of privilege.  It’s easy for us to point fingers at whatever we want in order to explain why something like this happens.  The shooting took place in a suburb considered one of the best and safest places to live.  In other words, it was in the heart of a highly privileged community.  We’re not outraged by our history of “godlessness” as a nation because our crimes were against the non-privileged.  We’re not outraged by domestic abuse or rape or murder or child abuse because those things are done by “those people.”  We have to try to force the conversation into the realm of removing God because to do otherwise is to admit that the shooter wasn’t one of “those people”—and almost never is.

To admit that the crime was against “us” and committed by “us” (rather than the “other”) is to admit that we all have the potential to commit evil acts.

I’m not saying that we would go out and do something terrible, only that we could.  Most of us have enough filters and enough checks in the system to prevent us from doing such things.  But in our humanity, it is always something that lurks under the surface.  Most Christians call it “sin nature.”  Other people have other words for it.  It doesn’t matter what word we use, it means essentially the same thing.

What we might be forgetting, though, is the other side of that.  While we may have some kind of potential for evil, we have a much greater capacity for good.  We Christians might call it being created in the image of God; other people call it something else.  Whatever word or words we use, the concept remains the same.  We all bear this goodness, this truth, this light of our humanity inside us.  For most of us, it’s what prevents us from going out and committing terrible acts of violence against our fellow people.

Instead of believing the lie that we need our country to return to a mythical state of godliness, I’m choosing to focus on seeing that image of God in people today.  I’m choosing to recognize it first in my husband and children: to hear it in my daughter’s soft voice as she plays with her stuffed animals and in the rich, graceful tones of my son’s saxophone; to see it in my husband’s eyes when he greets us coming through the door after work.  I choose to find it in my sisters, without whom my life would be emptier.  I choose to appreciate it in my extended family, both the one into which I was born and the one into which I married.  I choose to see it in my son’s teacher at school, who herself is curious about the world around her and encourages her students to feel the same.  I choose to hear it in the warm laughter of my friends, chatting while our children play.  I choose to find it in the grocery store, in Walmart, at the dentist’s office, and at the hairdresser.  And then, when I find that light everywhere around me, I’m going to stop acting like God is missing in our country and start acting like He’s been here all along.