By Bill Leonard
“Summon the wailing women to come. Send for the women skilled in keening to come quickly and raise a lament for us, that our eyes my run with tears and our eyelids be wet with weeping…. Teach your daughters the lament. Let them teach one another this dirge: Death has climbed in through our windows. It has entered our palaces. It sweeps off the children in the open air and drives young men from the streets” (Jeremiah 9: 18, 21 NEB).
Jeremiah said it. Millennia later, you’d think those words were written for events at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., after 20 children and six adults died in a horrific massacre perpetrated by a man-child gone mad.
Hearing the wails that erupted as President Barak Obama read the names of the dead in a community worship service on the Sunday evening after the murders, the ancient words of both Jeremiah and Matthew linked Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” in first century Palestine with 21st century Connecticut:
“A voice was heard in Rama, wailing and loud laments; it was Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing all consolation, because they are no more” (Matthew 2:18).
The same scriptures that offer hope also describe the reality of evil that can overtake any of us, any time, any place.
You can buy a Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at Walmart. That was the weapon of choice for the 20-year-old murderer Adam Lanza, a gun legally licensed to his mother, who was the first of his victims.
The Bushmaster AR-15 was apparently the weapon used by Jacob Tyler Roberts earlier the same week when he killed two people in a random shooting spree in an Oregon shopping mall. It was the firearm used by James Holmes in his attack in the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., earlier this year, killing and wounding multiple victims.
The gun remains available in at least 1,700 Walmart stores, so The Nation reported. Such weapons, adapted to rapid-fire ammunition clips, can be secured at places as basic to American culture as Walmart or at national gun shows. Gun shows apparently account for 40 percent of firearm purchases in a context which requires little or no immediate background check.
Were these gun-purchasing venues to blame for the 12 mass murders that took the lives of 88 people in the U.S. this year alone? Debates over that question rage. But the general silence of national leaders in response to earlier shootings was deafening until the inconsolable laments of families were heard by millions who watched the service in Newtown on the third Sunday in Advent, 2012.
Since then, voices as varied as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, a longtime proponent of increased firearm legislation, and conservative MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough have taken up the lament with calls for more strenuous laws for sales of automatic weapons and multi-shot ammo clips.
Confessing that “the ideologies of my past career were no longer relevant” after the Newtown debacle, Scarborough declared that the Constitution does not allow “gun manufacturers the absolute right to sell military-styled high-caliber semi-automatic combat assault rifles with high capacity magazines to whoever the hell they want.”
Other analysts across the ideological spectrum now suggest that as a result of the Newtown slaughter the “national psyche is changing” and that new attention must be given to issues that include: 1.) firearm regulation and use; 2.) increased resources for responding to the mentally ill; and 3.) strategies for confronting the “culture of violence” evident in certain video games, films and music.
Conventional wisdom and past experience suggest that dealing with even one of those concerns will be complex, controversial and laborious. Nonetheless, Newtown seems to have created a will for it.
What might this mean for people of faith? Perhaps clues for faith-based responses were evident in the community worship broadcast from Newtown that Advent Sunday evening. In profound ways it revealed that communities of faith representing multiple religious heritages and theological-cultural viewpoints could come together in a desperate but concerted effort to console the inconsolable.
Representatives of those diverse religious communions reached deep into their holy books, prayer traditions and pastoral resources to offer immediate presence and sustained care. Catholic, Protestant, Baha’i, Muslim, Jewish ministers, they were the people “skilled in keening” (mourning), who knew how to raise a lament, to give voice to the collective grief of an inconsolable people.
The tragedy at Newtown means that faith communities in every town and city must prepare as intentionally as any other set of “first responders” before firearm violence descends upon them. Representatives of religious traditions need extended strategies to confront the enduring lament of families who will struggle with grief long after the news crews have departed and the candlelight vigils have gone out. This is ministry of presence for the long haul.
The slaughter of the Newtown innocents compels changes — social, legislative and cultural. Yet if recent history is any indication, other times of horrendous violence probably lie ahead.
When death climbs in through our windows, will we be “skilled” enough to respond to the inevitable laments?