Displaced Outrage and What We Get Used To

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“We may believe that God will exact perfect justice in the world to come but we live in this one. Prayer is powerful but it is too often used as an excuse to avoid doing the difficult work of holding our society accountable for its ills and working to dismantle and rebuild it.”

-Rev. Will Gafney, “#what2preach When Blood is Running in the Streets” blog, 2016

Like many of you, I woke up yesterday to news of yet another mass shooting in the Ten Oaks community in California. Nearly all of the victims were my age plus or minus a few years, or the ages of students I work with. This shooting occurred not two weeks after the racially-motivated shootings at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue and the Louisville Kroger. Not nine months after the shooting that killed 17 students in Parkland, Florida. A little more than a year after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history occurred in Las Vegas, in which one of the survivors was then killed in the Ten Oaks shooting two days ago.

There are lists of dozens, hundreds more, many of which occur daily but receive little to no press coverage. Then there are the deaths of young Black men and women, gunned down or assaulted by police as racism continues to take on flesh and live in the systems and structures all around and within us. Then there are the trans and non-binary folks, especially trans women of color, killed in quiet corners and hotel rooms.

Before their deaths, these folks who are suddenly gone from us were gathered with friends, with people who made them feel safe and accepted in a pressure-filled world that too often does not understand. They were taking notes in class, laughing and pulling their hair back, dancing, sipping a beer while music played. They were living life, just as we all do; trying to make sense of who they are and what they are about; trying to pay the bills and care for themselves and others.

Thousands of lives ripped apart by bursts of hatred that has been allowed to fester beneath souls and flesh that are terrified, isolated, vulnerable to damaging theology, ideology and rhetoric that dehumanizes and distorts.

I thought about writing this all down yesterday, about attempting to capture the mixture of “not again”s and anger and numbness that I feel, just because it has to come out of me onto paper.

But I didn’t. I went about my day, as many of us do. I talked about it a bit with a friend. I read more Facebook reactions and online news articles about it. But I felt too angry: at political leaders who do nothing meaningful to protect their supposed constituents from future harm. At myself, for letting myself be part of the complacent machine that also contributes to these events that keep happening, and for sharing something publicly now but not after recent shootings of unarmed Black man in my hometown.
I feel powerless and afraid and shocked and numb, all at once.

But I think I also didn’t write about it because I was afraid of my own honesty about how angry I feel at the broader American Christian culture—a culture I both swim in and often feel quite disconnected from. I’m angry and sad and even oddly understanding about how our responses of thoughts and prayers and well-crafted Facebook posts that call for more gun control, that lament the violence in our world, just don’t seem to make one damn bit of difference.

Even seeing the “How long, O Lord?”s that people (myself included) post on social media in an effort to name what can’t be named—to offer our pleas for mercy and understanding in the midst of what has no easy answers or solutions—feels half-hearted to me right now.

I think for every “How long O Lord?” that I read or write, I can feel God saying back to me and to this country, “How long, my people? How long will you keep doing this?” I think God’s been saying it forever, but God continues to risk relationship with us.  

Why do we get used to this? Why is our outrage so displaced? Much of this American Christian narrative that we read about looks like communities who claims that a Christian ethic compels them to abstain from baking wedding cakes or denying access to birth control, or waging wars with secular holiday advertising, all in the name of exercising their Christian faith.

But where is the exercise of religion when we are literally watching our children and our people die? Where is the public Christian outrage to that?

What are waiting for? What will it take before we rearrange our lives to demand that our values- religious or not- mean that we will not let someone else die because of racism, transphobia, sexism, and fear and hatred that have been allowed to fester?

I do believe in the power and beauty and giftedness of human beings, but right now I’m desperate for accountability. I’m desperate for community that actually transforms people, as much as I am desperate for gun control legislation and access to good mental health resources. We have forgotten to be responsible to ourselves and others. We have created a society that makes machines out of us, so time-scarce and power-, status- and money-hungry that we are unable to see the sacredness of our own frailty, humility and creativity, and unable to fully acknowledge the ways in which these systems of profit and power that we live by are oppressive. And it’s awful to say it, but we are the reason that people are dying. And until we reckon with that, we will remain stuck in our cycles of traumatic event-àshock and grief-à  blame and vigilsà move on with life without integrating any of it. We’ve got to make space for outrage, to do something healthy with it, and to take actions together and beyond the prayer lists and vigils in our workplaces, homes, families, churches/places of worship

Thank you for reading these raw, rambling words.

Eva