Yesterday morning I promised to follow up my blogpost about the February 14 trifecta of Valentine’s Day, Oregon’s Birthday and Ash Wednesday. I wasn’t prepared, at the time, to finish my Ash Wednesday reflection for I hadn’t yet been to church to receive the smudge of a cross on my forehead. Little did I know, at the moment I was blogging, 17 innocent human beings, most of them children, were being slaughtered by an AR 15 assault weapon at a school in Florida.
After hearing the report of America’s latest celebration of gun rights, in a stupor of rage and disbelief and “what the hell is wrong with us?”—-we went to church. The priest read the Ash Wednesday liturgy from a book and we received the mark on our brow with no mention of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School whatever. Are you fucking kidding me?
America, I am so pissed at us. I don’t like us. I don’t like that I am part of us. I don’t like even being associated with a church or a religion that doesn’t know what to say to this outrage! Us should be ashamed to be us. At least the NRA chose to take down it’s Valentine Day tweet encouraging men and women to buy guns for the loves of their lives on February 14. Still, as the blood was still flowing on the classroom floor, the stocks of gun manufacturers soared. I don’t pretend to be an authority for what our repentance in dust and ashes means in the midst of another day like this. I wish I could ask the mother in the picture.
I don’t think we need to see any other image in order to get the message of Lent in America. When there is blood and body fluids spattering our neighbor’s faces and the walls of the classrooms where our children are supposed to be safe, there is blood and body fluid spattering ours and we know none of us are safe until we all are safe. Everyone’s face is smeared with an ashen cross or none of our faces are so marked. One’s audacious crucifixion is everyone’s. That’s all. But we can’t be trusted when we say we honor that cross or that humanity until we risk our whole lives to stand up to the manufacturers of violence and their kin, acknowledge that we are the most violent nation on the face of the earth, acknowledge that there is something deeply morally wrong with us and admit that guns are the problem.
This is all I know today.
AMEN, John