A radical Muslim group burns to death another Muslim man in a cage, pictures surface from lynching and burnings in the South in the early 20th Century, a state judge directs judges of lower courts to ignore a federal judge’s order to issue gay marriage licenses, and three Muslim students are murdered by a neighbor proclaiming to be a part of the new atheist organization. So much hate. So much violence. In the name of religion and against the name of religion. We live in dark times…really we always have, it’s just that we now have the omnipresence of media to bring pictures of it closer to home on our TVs, computers and mobile devices.

In a few minutes violence and hatred seem to gain the upper hand over decades of love.

Omid Safi is his column Let Our Suffering Speak and Be Public wrote of the three students murdered in Chapel Hill, SC, “I mourn as part of a human community, because I see that decades of love and sacrifice that went into making them who they were can be silenced by the hateful, violent actions of a deranged man with a gun in a few minutes. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong, not just with the fact that young people this beautiful are taken from us so soon, but that in a few minutes violence and hatred seem to gain the upper hand over decades of love. I want to believe, I choose to believe that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. I want to believe that light overcomes darkness and that hatred is bound to vanish before love. These nights make it harder to hang on to that faith.”

Faith and Flawed Humanity

Faith is a great source of sustenance and my prayer is that it will carry those who suffer so greatly in this world to a place of peace and respite. Faith, of any stripe I suspect, also carries with it the potential to inflict and/or perpetuate suffering when proponents come to believe that they are right…that their way of thinking and belief is the only one and true right way. This way of thinking, is antithetical to faith as its arrogance puts human beings as the center instead of the God they worship.

But this kind of arrogance is not just reserved for those who participate in religion, as we have seen in the story emerging about Craig Hicks, the self professed atheist who murdered those three Muslim students. Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig in her article The Chapel Hill Murders Should be a Wake up Call for Atheists says, “Perhaps this will be a moment of reflection for the New Atheist movement and its adherents. If nothing else, the takeaway should be that no form of reasoning, however obvious to a particular cohort, has a monopoly on righteousness. And no ideology, supernatural or not, has a monopoly on evil.”

In Christianity the word we use for this is Sin–the imperfect state of being human. No one escapes it. Not inside  the church, the synagogue, the  mosque nor outside. Sin is what propels us to move beyond the right desire for justice in the face of tragedy and injustice, to a desire for vengeance. Sin carries us from humility and the recognition of our interconnectedness to arrogance and the belief that because of our faith, our wealth, our nationality, our race, our privilege, we are better than and able to judge or even take the life of another.

Hope Beyond Ourselves

It is because of the natural state of our imperfection that we must strive to choose the better angels of our nature…and we simply cannot do that by putting ourselves at the center of the Universe. As a human being and a Christian, I have to look outside of myself and turn again and again to the example of Jesus who shows us that only love wins…the kind of Love that is willing to turn the other cheek, and pray for one’s enemies and extend forgiveness even to those who tortured and kill.

That kind of love is very hard to live as a human being and so I have to work at it. In the Christian faith we are coming upon the season of Lent which is patterned after Jesus’ 40 day wilderness wandering during which he left the privilege of home and comfort to fast, pray and face temptation. This is a time of penitence and self reflection during which Christians will take up the spiritual disciplines of fasting (from food or anything that we enjoy in excess), prayer, study and acts of service. I invite you to participate in these Lenten practices (which begins on Ash Wednesday, February 18th).  Go to an Ash Wednesday service. Fast from something you enjoy that is not necessary to your sustenance. Try an online retreat. Learn more about prayer and how to pray. Read a daily Lenten devotional. Volunteer in some way that reaches out to others and betters your community.

Only Love

Grief, shock and anger are all natural emotions we feel in the wake of tragedy and injustice. How we live through those emotions and what we choose to do with them holds the powerful potential for healing or further wounding. My hope for myself and others is that we will look beyond ourselves to the Love that has the power to heal all things. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated in his book Strength to Love: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.  Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”