Dear Christ & St. Luke’s,
Our hearts are breaking (again) today as we follow the news coming from the shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville yesterday. To be honest, I am running out of ways to express the anger, sadness, sickness, and heartbreak that come from each of these instances of horrific violence. Too many times. Too much bloodshed.
As a parent of young children, it is especially gut wrenching to have another one of these shootings happen in a school setting, where such young, promising lives are senselessly cut short. If you are having trouble coming up with ways to talk with your kids about this event or others like it, Kathy Hanna, our Director of Children, Youth and Family Ministry has generated a list of resources that can help.
As we move into Holy Week we will be confronting the capacity of human beings to do awful, terrible, hateful, violent things to one another. It won’t be hard to imagine examples of the way in which such sin continues to rule our day. What might be harder to imagine is that we have any recourse to change it. But that too is part of our Christian story: as people who believe in resurrection we are not just excited about the prospect of life after death but are committed to the promotion of life over death here, and now.
Therefore it is incumbent upon us to take action so that everyone—especially our children—has the opportunity to live in joy, peace, and health. That means not sowing seeds of hatred and violence in our own lives but instead continuing to extend love and acceptance to all people. It means finding ways to give compassion and care to those in need of healing. And it also means speaking up and out against any act of unnecessary violence and the tools which make such acts so easy to accomplish.
This is our calling. This is our responsibility, and this world is within our reach if we but have the will and the courage to make it so.
Peace be with us all, especially those in Nashville whose world has been ripped apart, and who need our prayers of compassion and support as they piece its fragments back together.
In the name of God who is life and love and peace,
Fr. Noah
