Assassination and Remembrance

Our country has once again crossed a dark threshold. When will we break free from the pattern?

For the next few months while our associate rector is away on a well-deserved sabbatical, I have the duty and the delight of teaching one of his classes at our parish day school. It just so happens to be first period, so every day, we start with prayer and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. This morning, however, we also added an intentional moment of silence after the tragedies of yesterday, and of the last few weeks, and in memory of the victims of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

During the moment of silence, two things occurred to me: first, none of the fifteen freshmen in my class were alive to remember the 9/11 attacks. Second, I myself was sitting in a morning class as a high school freshman when the attacks occurred. I remember our teacher turning on the television just as the second plane hit the twin towers. I remember none of the teachers really knowing what to say for the rest of the day, until we got to the last period, which was marching band practice. The band director sat us down on the practice field, and just talked with us. I don’t remember much of what was said, except for one thing that he said to us: “Your lives will be different now. Years from now, you will remember how things were before today, and how things were after today.” It was the most meaningful, thoughtful, spot-on thing I ever heard him say for the eight years that he was one of my teachers.

Earlier today, I wrote to my parish—as I suspect a lot of pastors did. I wrote about the utter absurdity of political assassinations, but I also wrote about a less talked-about event yesterday: this year’s 48th school shooting wherein two teenagers were critically injured after being shot by a third student who then turned the gun on himself at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado. Since 2020, the leading cause of death in the United States for people 19 years old and under has been gunshot wounds—so common that most trauma centers have an acronym for it: GSW. And yet, Federal Law in a provision that has been included in every appropriations bill since at least 2005 (called the Dickey amendment) prohibits Federal agencies from studying root causes and suggesting policy solutions.¹ Make it make sense!

Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a throwing down of the gauntlet that can either serve as a marker of reform and self-assessment or as a marker of when we decided that the Wild West wasn’t so bad after all, and we can just shoot our way out of arguments. Towards the end of the Obama presidency, I said to a friend that it appears to me that the Right traffics in outrage and the Left traffics in condescension.

I am not naïve: Charlie Kirk espoused ideas and held convictions that I find utterly loathsome and counter to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and thank God I was not publicly executed for the dumbest thing I have ever said. Charlie Kirk demonized the LGBTQ+ community and was a self-avowed antifeminist and he was a beloved child of God who left behind a wife and two young children to grow up fatherless in a dangerous world. When did it become impossible to hold two complex and competing ideas in our minds at the same time? We can at once disagree strongly with someone’s ideas and actions, while also disavowing and resisting the use of violence and murder to solve our disagreements. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, who wielded a notoriously sharp pen, used to tell his clerks and the public during interviews, “I attack ideas, not people.” We must attack ideas with which we disagree with better ideas, not bullets. I remember a time when we would have labeled countries who executed people for ideas as terrorist-led nation-states and put them on the “do not travel” list at the State Department. Now, I fear, we are becoming a State that refutes rival ideas with violence and force.

We can talk about the rise in violence or violent rhetoric or partisanship or whatever on the left or the right. I remain wholly unconvinced that these are causal. I think they exist, but I don’t think they have caused the moment in which we find ourselves. What alarms me gravely is the dramatic rise in cruelty in virtually every corner of our lives. In his watershed book, Exclusion and Embrace—certainly one of the most important works of theology authored in my lifetime—Miroslav Volf makes this observation:

Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners. But no one can be in the presence of the God of the crucified Messiah for long without overcoming this double exclusion—without transposing the enemy from the sphere of monstrous inhumanity into the sphere of shared humanity and herself from the sphere of proud innocence into the sphere of common sinfulness.²

Cruelty is the gateway to dehumanization. What do I mean by cruelty? I mean a callous indifference to the humanity of another, and in its most sinister forms, taking pleasure in another’s pain. When we stop caring about another person’s humanity—and the duty we have as fellow Christians to respect their God-given dignity and worth—then it’s only a few degrees from not caring to denying their humanity altogether.

I hope you didn’t come this far, dear reader, and expect me to offer some tonic or strategy or practice that can bind up our collective wounds. I’m a priest, not a miracle worker. Still, I’ll put in a word with the Lord at the Evening Office, and again at Compline, and again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. It’s in times like this when I’m reminded of why I pray in the first place—not so that I can tell God how to do God’s job, but so I can open my lungs and breathe God into me.

I’ve been thinking today about GK Chesterton’s forceful poem-turned-hymn. May it be a blessing.

O God of earth and altar,
bow down and hear our cry,
our earthly rulers falter,
our people drift and die;
the walls of gold entomb us,
the swords of scorn divide,
take not thy thunder from us,
but take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,
from lies of tongue and pen,
from all the easy speeches
that comfort cruel men,
from sale and profanation
of honor, and the sword,
from sleep and from damnation,
deliver us, good Lord!

Tie in a living tether
the prince and priest and thrall,
bind all our lives together,
smite us and save us all;
in ire and exultation
aflame with faith, and free,
lift up a living nation,
a single sword to thee.

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5993413/

2. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation p. 124.