To Those Who Are Being Saved

Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial

Voices echo, "this is what salvation must be like after a while."

But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues,

You can tell by the way she smiles.

-Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna

Sometimes I think we ought to entirely retreat into poetry, song and story for all of our meaning.  I get so worn out trying to confront the mysteries of creation and love and loving creation using mere prose.  Songs and poems let you live with an image, they force you to interpret for yourself.  For instance, reasonable people could certainly disagree about what Dylan was talking about in the above lyric, given that the context of it is a song about being haunted by the memory of a past love affair, I suspect it probably had something to do with that theme, but yet the idea of putting infinity up on trial can go so much further than that.

In a museum you walk through collections of art, some are very old, some are very new, and with each work you are given the authority and the responsibility to judge whether or not you like it.  You may interpret the work of the artist however you like, and man that can be dangerous.  Sometimes I see people walking around museums with those little talking handset things that have pre-recorded explanations of things.  I got one of those in the Cathedral in Burgos and I listened to all of about three entries before I just shut the thing off and decided to go it on my own.  I get that there is a lot of expert opinion on art, I get that there are probably "more correct" ways to interpret the work, but sometimes that just sucks all the joy and wonder out of it.

Sometimes knowing too much about what the artist intended is not a good thing.  For instance, I don't want to know exactly what Mona Lisa was smiling about.  Some of the best pictures of my kids were these pictures taken of them by a photographer who had a remote control noise maker that would make flatulent sounds at the press of a button.  It got spontaneous smiles and giggles out of three and four year olds and it produced some wonderful pictures.  Mona Lisa may have been smiling like that because DaVinci was making googly eyes at her, or because she was thinking some deep and winsome thoughts about the nature being immortalized, or she may not have even been an actual person and she was made up in DaVinci's head, or maybe she really did have the highway blues (whatever that means), the fact of the matter is: we just don't know, and that adds to the appeal of the work.

By virtue of my line of work, I say a lot of words, and I write some too.  Sometimes people hear things that I didn't think I said, or they interpret my writing in a way that is somewhat different than what I meant.  The more creative and poetic I get, the more this happens.  Often (in fact the majority of times) this is a serendipitous interpretation, they heard something that spoke to their heart, they felt the Holy Spirit moving.  I am humbled when this occurs because I know I have been at the center of something really wonderful.  But I have also had moments where my words have been twisted to something rather less than wonderful, and all I have is the internal knowledge that I didn't mean them that way.  And of course, sometimes I say things that are just plain wrong.

So when it comes to putting infinity on trial, I find that sometimes less is more, because by the above scheme, I've got a 2/3 chance of doing more harm than good.  I may improve my chances by being faithful to the work of exegesis and rooting what I do in prayer and devotion, but it still shakes out in favor of being misunderstood.  So I don't feel particularly okay making promises about what "salvation must be like."  See, in my head and heart I don't really much care, all I really need to know is that it's salvation, being saved, being pulled up out of the pit, being welcomed into the oneness of God.  Honestly, I'll be a bit surprised if heaven is actually streets paved with Gold and giant mansions for all the really good people.

That actually seems like too much of a destination oriented idea to my way of thinking.  I think that we've got work to do in the time that has been given us.  Salvation seems like more of a journey than a destination, and I really haven't known anyone who was absolutely ready to meet their Creator (I have known some people who were okay with dying, mostly because they were just tired of suffering.

Yes, I know about "Jesus Paid It All" and such.  Yes, I believe that too.  But I think we are making a mistake if with think that we can or should have salvation all sown up and figured out.  It would be like looking at the Mona Lisa and knowing exactly what she's smiling about.  It would be like walking through a museum and being forced to know only the "right" interpretation of all that beauty.  It would be putting infinity on trial, and in the process the world would a be a less interesting and less beautiful place.  Your salvation and the salvation of the world are God's masterpiece.  It is not your job to judge the artist, see the work for what it is, your interpretation might change a bit from time to time, but it is more likely that the work will change you more.

Is Okay, But...

This is how the internet works for me:  I read things like this article by Francis Schaeffer, who is the son of a famous evangelical of the 20th century (same name, but not to be confused).  I really like the premise because of the very biblical condemnation of hardness of heart.  Jesus, in fact, uses our own hardness of heart as an explanation of why divorce is acceptable according to the Law of Moses, (Matthew 10: 1-12) basically because people are broken and sometimes that leads to the necessity of divorce, but in an ideal world, it is not what God intends.
In fact, this seems to be a general leaning in Jesus' approach to the law: the law is for our protection and well being, but is not an end in and of itself.  It is not a path to God unless the relationship of law and grace is apprehended, understood and worked out (Lutheran colleagues rejoice).  In other words good behavior and ritual observance just aren't going to get you right with God.  Sin manifests itself as legalism and perhaps over-wrought fundamentalism even among those who strive for a rigorous, even austere level of religious devotion.
Schaeffer has a lot of anger about fundamentalism of all sorts, which you see the fruit of in this writing.  You need to know that his parents were major players in the rise of the religious right and the moral majority, and they were also sort of borderline cult leaders who (barely) managed to stay within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy.  You also need to know that Francis Schaeffer the elder was a contradiction in many ways: an ultra-religious sort who devoted his life to creating Christian community and evangelism, and also an extreme authoritarian, who according to his son's later writings was abusive physically and emotionally towards his wife and family.
Frank has some reasons to be angry at fundamentalists, and he is one of the loudest voices telling us that fundamentalism, in all its forms, is dangerous and to be resisted by the Church, our society and indeed by the very Spirit of God.  To which I say, "Amen."
However, I am also a bit unnerved by the shotgun approach he takes to this mission.  I'm not sure everyone will read the article with the same eyes, but I feel like he's just blasting away, in an angry tirade, and not giving full consideration that he may be, as Dylan says, "fearing not I'd become my enemy in the instant that I preach."
It is undoubtedly a difficult task to be passionate and prophetic in this age of polarization without becoming exactly the sort of demagogue you set out to unmask.  Schaeffer does not always walk the line successfully, but if you know his story and the source of  his particular bias, it gets a little easier to forgive him when he gets cranky, but you still need to know that he's dealing cards from an emotionally charged deck.
That being said, hard hearts have been on my mind a lot lately, because it seems like there are an awful lot of them out there.  People who fail the basic empathy test, and don't even come close to the radical love mandated by Christ, when it comes to the other.  Frank shines some light on the real hot button topics, but it extends into almost every arena of our life: we just don't know how to treat each other decently.  Which is stupid because we've been practicing for our whole lives and we seem to be able to do it a thousand times a day during the course of normal daily events.  We just seem to fail when it comes to ideologically loaded topics like politics, race, economics, and religion.
There's even a "rule of thumb" about not discussing those things in a bar or other social situation.  Why?  Because they might lead to an argument, or maybe even a fight. Why? Because we have not learned how to apply our basic civility to these loaded subjects.  It is not because we lack intellectual capacity or even basic decency, it's because we have learned to lead too much with our emotions.
On Star Trek: The Next Generation, the ship's counselor is a part human, part Betazoid.  Counselor Troi, is what is called an "Empath" on the show, which means she can sense feelings extremely accurately.  Betazoids are telepathic, so Troi got the emotional part of that.  It comes in awfully handy to Picard, who is a thinking man, rather uncomfortable with emotions.  But Troi's ability to sense emotions has a weakness, if her own feelings are strong, she can't always read what someone else is feeling.
This is, I think, an accurate assessment.  The more you are dominated by an emotion, the less you are able to empathize, unless that particular person is feeling the same as you are.  People can grieve together, but the worst thing for someone who is grieving is to see another person in a super, happy, wonderful situation, it's just like salt in a wound, and shuts down empathy.
It has been hard for people who feel like progress is being made with regard to civil rights, to empathize with people who still feel like they are having their world shaken underneath them.  I think this applies to the issues of racial, gender, and sexual orientation.  In each one of these cases, each stride by the oppressed feels like a threat so some privilege that has been long assumed by straight, white males.  I know this because I am a straight, white male, and if I don't keep my channels open, it's all too easy for me to take my status for granted and lose empathy for people who aren't like me.
I can like most of what Schaeffer says, but his anger worries me because I know it creates a blind spot, not just in him, but in me.  The more I agree with him, and the more of his anger I internalize the more I lose the ability to read and analyze the situation and feel empathy, in short, the harder my heart becomes.
And hard hearts will eventually get broken as surely as open ones, it will just shatter into more pieces.

Ten

And what can I tell you,

My brother, my killer,

What can I possibly say?

I guess that I miss you,

I guess I forgive you,

I'm glad that you stood in my way.

-Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat

Dear Jon,

So it's been ten years to the day since I got that phone call from Dad saying that you were gone.  The last decade has been quite a trip to say the least.  I thought, instead of writing another poem or something, I would write you a letter. This stuff doesn't always make sense so bear with me.

First, I want to say sorry, because I don't think I've always been fair to you.  Sometimes I was angry, sometimes I was maudlin, sometimes I was even downright spooky. I went through phases where I totally romanticized who you were and even, to some extent, how you died.  I know that's weird, but so many of my favorite artists and musicians have been heroin addicts, I couldn't help sometimes equating you with Kurt Cobain or William S. Burroughs or Lou Reed.  The clarity that you were just a kid who made some really bad choices took some time to sink in.  But my romantic visions were just one of the ways I had of working through the reality of loss.

After ten years, I have figured out that pretty much everything in my life that relates to your death is now much more about me than about you.  I am not the same person I was when I was 30, any more than you would have been the same person you were at 24.  Your death is a part of pretty much every thing that has taken place in my life in the past ten years.  It has effected the way I do my job, the way I raise my kids, the type of husband, brother, and son I am.  Dad and I started walking the Camino on your 34th birthday, and in our own ways each of us felt like we were taking you with us on that walk.  What I realized somewhere during that 500 miles is that you now occupy a very different place in my heart than you did a decade ago.  What you are to me now is defined more by your absence than your presence.  You're like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle that was eaten by the dog, you're always going to be missing.

I wonder most about what is missing when it comes to our family.  Mom, Dad, Julia, and all the kids, well we are who we are, and being who we are we sort of do our own thing.  The New Jersey crowd has their thing, and the four of us in my family visit it from time to time.  I recognize now that one of the greatest things about the thing that Dad and I did this spring was that it was the first time in 10 years that we actually had a vision that really, fully included each other.

Remember that trip to the Outer Banks the year before you died? The last family vacation?  It really was the last one, and I think that we can never really do that again without you.  We all have the wrong kind of stubbornness to really pull something like that together and make it work.

Speaking of the beach, you have pretty much ruined that for me, that's been sort of big pain in the rear-end for ten years now, because everyone else still freaking loves it, but it makes me sad.  I thought maybe that would pass, but it really hasn't.  I always pictured you and I and whatever assortment of offspring we had renting a big old house together and picking crabs and playing guitar on the deck and doing beach stuff.  I have this imaginary, grown up you in my head, and I just know he's never going to show up.

We have been telling the kids about you too, we have pictures of you holding Jack, during one of your detox visits to Plumville I think, you look pretty pale and sunken, and I remember what trouble you were in while we were welcoming babies and playing house.  I often wish you had actually moved into our basement, but I know somewhere that probably wouldn't have been the solution either.  Cate was born a month after you died.  You would really like her, in some ways her personality reminds me of you more than any of the other Gaskill progeny, she's always asking questions, she loves clowning around and wiling out, very emotional and compassionate, the same way you were when you were little.  And somewhere or other whenever I talk about you with the kids I know they would freaking love you, but they never got the chance.  Even if you never sort of settled down and grew up, they would still like the way you were always moving and always had some plan or scheme.  I think I bore them, the same way I used to bore you, my big adventures are always mostly in my head.  That was another thing that felt important about the Camino: it was out there, it took blood, sweat and tears.  Dad said that your trip to Tonga was sort of like your Camino. I suppose that's true, but I couldn't help thinking how much you would have loved what we were up to, and how much it would have kicked butt if you were actually with us.

Here's what I really want to say to mark 10 years: I'm trying to deal with the actual reality of you now.  I want to thank you, because in a way you helped me grow more by dying than you probably would have by living.  I know that sounds sort of crappy, know that I would rather have an actual 34 year old brother (even if he was a loser) than ten years of grief any day.  What I'm saying is that the suffering has not been for nothing.

Sometimes I look at other people who still have their brothers, taking vacations, going to ball games, having picnics etc, and I get a little jealous, but I think I understand that losing you put the pedal to the metal in some ways. I have had to wrestle with grief in my 30's the way that most people don't until they're old.  I have spent ten years writing about what this is like, singing songs that absolutely strip me raw, and trying to learn from a story that was cut off midway through the first chapter. 

Aunt Fran told us after you died that God told her you would grow much faster with Him, well I think that I have grown faster too, because of losing, and grieving and living with absence.  I'm much happier with who I am at 40 than I was at 30, and I don't think that's a coincidence.  I'm less judgmental, I'm more comfortable with sadness (and yet somehow happier and more content), and most of all I have more empathy for others who are suffering.  Losing you is an awful, yet somehow solid benchmark for a lot of the challenges we face in this life.  It is a constant reminder to laugh, cry and never take any good thing for granted.

So thank you.  Hope your growing up is coming along too.

Beneath the stains of time,

The feelings disappear,

You are somewhere else,

But I am still right here.

-NIN, Hurt

Bootstraps N' Such

It ill behooves the man who is not forced to live in a ghetto to tell those who must how to transcend its limitations.

-Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

Aside from the slightly oldish language like "ill behooves," it's easy to forget that Thurman wrote this thing 50 years ago.  Because apparently a lot of people, Republican and Democrat alike have not realistically dealt with the reality that opportunity in this country is in no way equal.  We chip away at barriers like race, sexual orientation, religious differences, and we try in fits and starts to do something about the socio-economic tragedy of our so-called land of opportunity.

There is this tendency to call every form of discrimination a phobia (homophobia, xenophobia, islamaphobia, gender-dysphoricaphobia (okay I may have made that last one up, but you get the point)).  This implies that people have neurotic fears of people who exhibit these conditions, that's what phobias are: irrational fears, perhaps even to the point of panic or being utterly disabled by that fear.  However, most phobias have some sort of trigger, and most of the common phobias are present in the general population, for instance claustrophobia, fear of small or enclosed spaces.  This is a fear that is founded in basic survival instinct, going into small places can be dangerous, i.e. caves, there can be scorpions, spiders (arachnaphobia is not just a movie) or bears and badgers, there is the danger of collapse, in other words, one might have legitimate reasons to fear small spaces, None of those actually apply to say getting an MRI, but most people find that experience somewhat unpleasant because it places them in a confined space in which they must hold still, while the thing bangs and whirs and makes various danger sounds.

Calling discriminatory or prejudiced attitudes a phobia may be correct in that it can often manifest in ways that are neurotic or irrational, but it also raises the defense mechanisms of the person you are sticking with that label.  You are essentially committing the same error that people who vilify welfare recipients or migrant workers are making, you are from your own perspective, telling someone else that their ghetto is not a place they should want to live, but you are giving them absolutely no way to get out of it, in fact, you are probably only affirming their feelings of persecution because, "who are you to tell me..."

In the sermon on the mount, Jesus encourages empathy rather than control.  His injunctions to turn the other cheek, give more than is demanded, walk an extra mile, and love your enemy, are ways out of this trap, for everyone.  They are about much more than just non-violence, they are about escape from our phobias and neuroses.  When you understand how truly difficult someone has it, you will find it harder to hate them, even if their behavior or their demeanor rubs you the wrong way.

Here is perhaps an odd example, but one that relates particularly well to the problems of racial AND economic justice: rap music.  You probably know the evolution of blues and jazz from the synthesis of African tribal music and Christian/western folk music, and how antebellum slavery and the subsequent oppression of black folk precipitated the creation of these forms that later gave birth to Rock and Roll and Rhythm and Blues.  But do you know that rap/hip hop music was born because kids living in the ghetto were too poor to own instruments?

The art of beat-box, which is making rhythms and sounds with nothing but your mouth and body, and mixing, which involved using turntables to sample and mix existing music as a dance track or a background track for a rap were innovations born out of necessity, because poor kids had neither access or encouragement to train their musical gifts in more traditional ways.

Hip Hop can be vulgar, it can be mindless and nonsensical, but in some very important ways it can also help us to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.  Artists like KRS-One and Chuck D from Public Enemy can give people living in white suburbia a sense of what it's like to live in the ghetto.  Ice Cube and Tupac Shakur can talk about life in a world of gangs and drugs, and the music is an aid to empathy.  Eminem (who is white, but grew up really poor) can tell you about what it's like to be a poor white kid from Detroit's Eight Mile trailer parks who is trying to make it as a minority in the world of rap music.  The Notorious B.I.G. can tell you what it was like to grow up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and sell drugs before "making it" in the world of entertainment.  These may be stories you don't want to hear.  They may be stories that trigger some phobias.  They may sound angry, they may use bad words, but if you want to understand the struggles they face, maybe you should listen.

There can be a lot of sifting to do, but understanding is part of what we have to do.

We need to face our fears.

We need to stop naming everyone the enemy.

We need to recover our sense of empathy and common humanity.

One of the rappers I mentioned above, Chuck D wrote this: "The minute they see me, they fear me, I'm the epitome of Public Enemy," and I don't think this is posturing as a tough guy, I think that is a lament about the fact that the world sees him as a threat: an angry black man.  I understand that, as a middle class white guy, I will never entirely understand what it's like to live in the ghetto or to be truly hemmed in by a racist system, but I believe that we can try to understand better, and at the very least stop blaming people for where they're born and criticizing them for not climbing their particular mountain of trouble the way we think they should.

Love and Death

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

As a seal upon your arm;

For love is strong as death, 

Passion fierce as the grave,

Its flashes of fire a raging flame.

-Song of Solomon 8:6

The Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs is one of those wee little books tucked away between more "important" things.  It is one of the more R-rated pieces of literature in the Bible, hiding all sorts of lusty language about breasts and loins in between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah.  It's sort of like discovering D.H. Lawrence between Nietzche and Goethe.  Yes, it's a love poem.  Yes, it is full of metaphors and pretty much impossible to read literally, and yet here is a truth that is absolutely true, so true in fact that it defies the very nature of literal readings and fundamentalism in general: "love is strong as death."

If I had to pick one phrase that summed up the narrative contained in canonical Scripture as succinctly as possible, it would be that: "Love is strong as death."  It is what is proven by God's involvement with the children of Abraham, despite all the ways they go wrong. It is what is proven by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, it is what (I believe) will be proven about all of Creation when everything is said and done.

See also 1 Corinthians 13: "and now these three remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love."  Sometimes it's hard to hold on to that truth, I mean when things go sour.  When it looks for a moment like death is going to win, when the cry that is on our hearts is "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I think it's a mistake to brush that moment off, I think love and death are connected in a very yin-yang sort of relationship.  After all, the reason why we love on a biological level is so that we can procreate, and the reason why we procreate is because we are not immortal, and so there is a need created by death to which love is the answer.  The mystery at the core of this is stated in 1 John: God is love.  The Creator has made everything that is because the essence of being is love.

The majority of English translations keep the equation in balance: "Love is strong as death" or "as strong as death" though a few do actually tip the balance in favor of love (CEV) for instance, but I think that's a mistake, reading a bit too much triumphalism into the text.  Which we tend to do... I tend to do... because I want it to be true.  I like love, I'm not a big fan of death, but I do recognize the part it has to play.  As I mentioned yesterday, it would seem there are times where love does not win the battle.  There are times when hatred, fear and anger get the best of us.  

The King James Version, which I will go to sometimes for translations of poetry in Scripture (but not much else) says: "Love is strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave."  Now, as a whole, I prefer the "passion/ fierce" reading, but I can see the balance coming out, and the relationship that gets easily twisted when we love the wrong things or love in the wrong way.

Yes, you can love wrong.  You can love selfishly, you can love in a way that is controlling and bitter.  You can love in ways that honestly have no business calling themselves love.  Love can have a bit of an identity crisis, in that it is sometimes hard to define, and it does not always stand up and shout about itself.  That job is left to poets and musicians.  That is one way you can tell that death is love's equal, it is powerful enough to walk unabashedly into the room and proclaim it's nature with no hiding or obfuscation.  Death is unapologetic and undeniable.

As Paul describes love in 1 Corinthians 13, "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth."

If you follow with that definition, and Jesus' call to love your neighbors and your enemies you will find that there is an awful lot of very bad behavior going on in the world today, much of it being perpetrated by people who are supposed to believe that "love is strong as death."

We get this so very wrong, especially in those moments when it's most crucial to get it right. As I look around I see people who are self-identified Christians totally failing the love test.  They are acting with hatred and fear in their hearts, they are raging against death while trying to use the vocabulary of violence and power, but those words belong to death, death defines them and gives them their true weight.

Love is strong as death, but it doesn't get to use the same weapons.  When love wins it sometimes looks like a cross.  When love wins it doesn't mean there is no tomb.  Love wins when it can take all the darkness and violence death has to deal out and still say, "I forgive, I love, I am love."

Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Outrage

A few days ago four Marines and one Navy officer were killed in Chattanooga Tennessee by Mohammed Abdulazeez.  The latest in a litany of all too frequent acts of mass violence, several of which have been directed at Military bases and personnel. Make no mistake, this tragedy is no less heartbreaking than any of the others, but as a nation we know how to deal with this.  They were soldiers, we lower our flags, we honor their memories and add their names to the list of the honored dead... oh and we start looking for the revenge.
This time too, the killer's name was Mohammed, not Dylan or James, we know what that's about right?  Like Osama and Saddam, he's the same sort of problem, a terrorist that got's to be got.  The only problem is that he's not part of some huge conspiracy, he was essentially the same as Dylan Roof (Charleston), James Holmes (Aurora), or Aaron Alexis (DC Navy Yard), he was, according to what we're finding out now, a man battling depression and possibly other forms of mental illness.  He was, in fact, Muslim, but he was also American.  He was a bit perturbed by the fact that his own government treated him as a criminal because of his name and his heritage, but it is unclear whether or not he ever actually became a terrorist by the definition most of us have in our heads.
It would make sorting out this whole tragedy that much simpler if he were found to have had some connection or even coaching from some middle eastern "death to America" types.  It would be great if, for a change, he wasn't just another case of our own disturbed, violence obsessed, psyche running amok and turning an unstable and disaffected young man into a killer.  It would be "easier" for us to handle a foreign threat, than to find out once again that "the killer is calling from inside the house."
Shooting sprees have been a thing in this country for quite a while.  You had Charles Whitman in the clock tower at the university of Texas in 1966, Sylvia Seegrist at the Springfield (PA) mall in 1985, Jillian Robbins (who I was actually acquainted with) at Penn State in 1996, Ryan Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School, Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary, James Holmes at a movie theater in Aurora Colorado, Aaron Alexis at the DC Navy Yard, Dylan Roof at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, and now Mohammed Abdulazeez in Chattanooga Tennessee.
And of course there are more, those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head (though I did have to Google some of the names). With the exception of Harris and Klebold, who worked together and planned rather extensively, it was more of a psychotic break than an evil conspiracy.  You'll notice there are a lot of white men (though women do get on the list), also Alexis was black, and now we have an Arab.
The core problem is still mental illness, it can be glossed over with white supremacy, rage at the government, anger at bullies, Muslim extremism, bad break-ups, but at the end of the day it's a lot more complicated than any of those things.  It is extreme disassociation, it is a combination of hatred of others and profound self-loathing.
We can fight the war on terror from now until Jesus returns, we're not going to stop this problem.  We can eliminate Al Quaida, ISIS, and whatever pops up to replace them, but unless we come up for an absolute cure for mental illness (or at least the stew of them that lead to this sort of thing) we will never be safe.  Our best defense is not security, locking all of our doors and windows doesn't help when the killer is in the house.  Our best defense is community.  Community that cares and pays enough attention to notice when someone is going off the rails.  Community that doesn't stigmatize people who actually try to get help.  Community that holds people strongly enough so that these sorts of explosions don't happen (at least not as frequently).
I mentioned that I knew one of the people on the list: Jillian Robbins, now I don't mean I was close with her, but she did sort of move in the same crowd as me and State College is a relatively small world.  She was a waitress at the Ye Olde College Diner where you could get cheap food and bad coffee.  When I say I knew her, I mean I knew her name before she made the news and became infamous.  She seemed pretty normal, and by normal, I mean not that much more disturbed than any of my other acquaintances.
So many of "my people" had been diagnosed with some sort of mood disorder.  I'm not talking like loony bin crazy, I'm just talking counseling and prescription meds crazy.  SSRI's (Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors) were the new thing for treating everything from severe bipolarity to the Monday blues.  And for a minute, people thought they had found the magic bullet in treating various sorts of mental illness.  Once there was a cure other than bomb-out tranquilizers like Lithium and Thorazine, or electroshock therapy, it seemed like mood disorders became sort of trendy. Depression was kind of ubiquitous, everybody was depressed, it was kind of our thing.
In the movie Reality Bites, which is so Gen-Xish that it really ought to come with a prescription for Prozac, the main characters leave the following message on their answering machine: "Hello, you have reached the winter of our discontent." It was literary (quoting Shakespeare and Steinbeck), and nihilistic and it pretty much summed up the feeling of a bunch of over-privileged and under-employed "slackers." The world we grew up in was defined by television and broken families and conspicuous consumption and Reaganomics, in other words it was like a plastic utopia that covered a really broken set of assumptions.  Kids and young people tend to see through that sort of facade, even if they can't quite sort out what is actually going on, they know that things just seem false. Our community extended only as far as the people we spent our days and nights with, and the rest of the world, including most adults, and a good number of "normal" people, just didn't understand what we were going through.
At that time, it felt like there would never be an end to the adolescent and post-adolescent malaise that gripped us.  Sometimes tragedy was the only thing that broke the monotony, we cried when Kurt Cobain committed suicide, we were wide eyed when Columbine happened or when we heard about the Rwandan Genocide, but for the most part our lives were lived in between media circuses.  The world seemed un-real and un-friendly, and what was probably worst of all it seemed like there was no hope.
This is as close as I ever got to the sort of dysphoria that can eventually lead to deciding that shooting a bunch of folks is a good idea.  I had a family and a few friends that always kept me away from that ledge.  Jillian did not, at least she didn't the day she climbed under a bush with a rifle and started picking people off.  She had disconnected and alienated most of the people who knew her, and when she broke no one knew it until it was too late.
I just don't know how you can fix that.  I know community is the answer, but it's not fool proof.  I know that, somehow or other, love is the only thing that can beat it once and for all, but most of us don't even know how to apply it or even when it's needed.  And no, as we saw with Dylan Roof, sometimes love doesn't always stop the violence.  It breaks my heart to think that there were so many chances for him to feel the love and acceptance of the people who he was about to kill, and yet... it never broke through. I think a state of being where love and community always win is actually what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the Kingdom of Heaven.  We ain't there yet.
But we can take small victories as we sit in the wake of tragedies like this, in other words, the Kingdom of Heaven can draw near to us.  Refuse to accept easy answers, repent, repent of our personal sins and of the sins of our society.  Instead of feeling righteous outrage, allow your heart to break for those who were killed.  If you are a Jesus-follower, that has to include the ones who did the killing, you know, the ones you like to name your enemy, you're supposed to forgive them.
I know, it seems crazy, but it's crazy in a way that sets you free.  It's crazy in a way that breaks this cycle of violence all to pieces.
The fact of the matter is that you may very well know someone who is inches away from being the next name on the list of mass shooters.  You can either live in fear of that, or you can do what Jesus suggested: Love them.  You don't know who they are, or what's going to break them, so you have to practice love towards everyone. Be kind, compassionate and understanding.  You don't have to fix them, you probably can't anyway, but you can be the Body of Christ.
It's not easy, but it's the way.

Words that Have Meaning

Thinking and communication lesson for today: defining the term "mutually exclusive."
I'm doing this as a public service, because lots of people seem to either not know it exists or severely misapprehend what it means.  Mutually exclusive means that two things necessarily preclude each other, they cannot overlap.  In a venn diagram mutually exclusive things are represented by two entirely separate spheres.  It is an old rhetorical trick to pretend that two things are mutually exclusive when they are not: for instance not everyone who wants to defend the confederate flag is a racist, the proof of that is that there have been black people who defend it.  However, a lot of people who proudly display the battle flag are racist, and in fact, the KKK and various other movements whose sole purpose was the oppression and intimidation of non-white people have rather enthusiastically used the flag as a symbol, therefore, despite the fact that it might be seen in another light, it's dominant message is racist.  There is a large enough overlap to make the argument that being racist and displaying the flag are mutually exclusive categories.
Example two: courage.  Caitlyn Jenner is courageous for doing what she has done in the public eye.  So are firefighters, soldiers and police.  Courage of one sort does not preclude courage of another sort.  The fact that something, which many people still understand very poorly (gender reassignment), can require courage does not somehow diminish the courage it takes to run into a gunfight or a fire to save someone's life.  While many would like to make these two things antithetical, they are not.
Example three: Abortion versus women's rights.  This is one of the single most divisive subjects of the past 50 years, and it has often been presented in tragically over-simplified rhetoric.  The fact of the matter is that choice and life are not mutually exclusive.  The lives of the unborn and the lives of their mothers cannot be declared mutually exclusive no matter how many thought gymnastics you want to do.  As a matter of fact educating and supporting women in reproductive choice is the absolute best way to reduce the number of abortions performed for non-health reasons.  I'm all for choice, and I'm also really against killing babies, and I am always looking for that wonderful place where those two things overlap.
Are there things that are mutually exclusive in the news?  Sure:
Donald Trump and sanity/good hair.
Hilary Clinton and being likeable.
Fox News and actual journalism.
Advertising and honesty.
You get the idea.