An Encyclical and a Massacre

fra-angelico_christ-crowned-with-thorns
An Encyclical and a Massacre
Brian Zahnd

Lord Jesus, help me to be a voice of peace, drawing your church in America away from its idolatrous allegiance to nationalism, militarism, consumerism, racism, violence, guns, and war. Amen.

I pray this prayer everyday. I’ve done so for years. It’s part of my morning liturgy of prayer. Praying this prayer has formed me in a certain way. (The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what we think God ought to do, but to be properly formed.) This prayer has influenced me to write books about forgiveness, beauty, and peace. My target audience is the evangelical church in America. My people.

I also pray the Confession of Sin from the Book of Common Prayer. I always pray it in the plural…

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you…

I pray this prayer in the plural because I know I am complicit in sins I have not personally committed. I know I benefit from sinful structures for which I’m not personally responsible. I benefit from an economy originally founded on stolen land and slave labor. I didn’t “do” these things, but still people like me benefit from them. I know this. So the very, very least I can do is pray, “Father, forgive us our sins.”

I prayed these prayers today. Like I do everyday. But today is different.

I’m reading Pope Francis’ encyclical and grieving a massacre. First, the encyclical…

LAUDATO SÍ (Praise Be To You) opens with these words…

‘Praise be to you, my Lord’. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. ‘Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs’. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she ‘groans in travail’ (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.”

Amen and Amen.

I haven’t always held a position of Christian nonviolence. I tell the story of my journey into the gospel of peace in my book A Farewell To Mars. But I’ve held a position of Christian environmentalism since I was a teenager. It’s always been obvious to me that those of us who call the Father of Jesus the Creator of the heavens and the earth should treat the gift of creation with sacred reverence. To pollute and pillage the planet for the sake of rapacious greed is a form of violence directed not only against creation, but the Creator. I was glad to see that in the fifth sentence of his encyclical, Pope Francis connects environmental exploitation with our addiction to violence:

“The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life.” –Pope Francis

After beginning to read the Pope’s encyclical, I heard about the horrible massacre at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. A twenty-one year old white supremacist entered the church during a time of prayer and Bible study where he sat next to the pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckey. After about an hour the assailant said, “I’m here to shoot black people. I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. You have to go.” The gunman then killed the pastor and eight other worshipers. The gunman’s words are a bitter distillation of the racist rhetoric that fuels white supremacist ideology. (Here is a profile of the nine victims.) This massacre occurred in a church that was once burned to the ground because its members had worked to end slavery. Now their suffering continues. The saints of Emanuel A.M.E. have entered fully into the sufferings of Christ.

In response to the massacre, President Obama said, “I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

Of course, the President is right. This kind of (now common!) mass violence does not happen in Canada or the UK or Australia or Germany or France, or any other developed Western nation.

But America is different. America is violent. America was founded upon violence, it is addicted to violence, it sanctifies the capacity for violence. The twin original sins of America — indigenous genocide and African slavery — have still not been fully owned and confessed. (The government sponsored eradication of Native Americans is virtually never mentioned — mostly because the genocide was so effective.) We keep hoping that someday we can just forget about this sordid past. But we cannot. We cannot because it is still with us.

We are a violent people. Violent in our history, violent in our rhetoric, violent toward the other, violent toward our planet. We are a violent people. Me included. I too am complicit. I too am a sinner.

It could have been me put the thorns in your crown
Rooted as I am in a violent ground
–Bruce Cockburn, Dweller By A Dark Stream

I don’t know where I’m going with this. I don’t have a “tidy” point to make. But I had to say something.

Lord Jesus, help me to be a voice of peace, drawing your church in America away from its idolatrous allegiance to nationalism, militarism, consumerism, racism, violence, guns, and war. Amen.

BZ

(The artwork is Christ Crowned With Thorns by Fra Angelico.)