A couple of thoughts today:
1. Spirituality explores vitality and meaning, the wholeness of human being and human community. There's just no reasonable way to divorce it from political concerns and realities. The issue of guns and weapons in American life is a case in point. In our attachment to violence as the means of safety and wellbeing, we have traumatized ourselves and compromised community trust across the country. This isn't a partisan issue: it's a human, communal, and (yes) political one.
When I preach on Sunday mornings or counsel parishioners in my office or their homes, I now face a community stressed and streched to the breaking point--by the possiblity that the next school massacre will be at their kids' school, by the reality that every second neighbor at the mall is packing a piece, by the grim and bloody news from Buffalo and Uvalde and Las Vegas and Orlando and on and on and on. Without any meaningful efforts to end the madness. Does this wear people down? Does it affect the spirit of a community? Does it stress families and marriages and friendships and neighborhoods? You bet it does. Spirituality suffers.
2. What I'm finding especially maddening this week, with today's ruling on guns and the inevitable ruling on abortion to follow, is the plain truth of it all. This is not--if it once was--an independent Court doing its own independent work in consideration of weighty moral and legislative concerns. This is now a very determinedly Right Wing Court--put together by Right Wing leaders like Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Donald Trump, to enact (without doubt and without question) the Right Wing agenda.
Does anyone out there (reasonably) disagree? Does anyone out there (reasonably) believe that these 6-3 decisions reflect an independent judicial branch, considering all sides of issues, weighing what's truly best and constitutional, and discerning (according to their duty and calling) the constitutionality of matters before them?
3. What I'm learning about the Second Amendment this summer is that it was in a very powerful and direct way a response to the South's commitment to perpetuating slavery and using armed militias as an active tool to prevent uprisings and liberation movements among free and enslaved Blacks. (See The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, by Carol Anderson) In order to commit to the union of states, Southern white landowners insisted on arming and engaging militias to quell any hint of uprising or rebellion. They knew--because it was happening--that the enslaved would eventually join together, organize and turn toward rebellion and freedom. And they also knew that their enormous privilege--and economic power--was built around the institution of bondage. The Second Amendment was designed, even in compromise, to assuage their fears. To enforce racism.
It's a devastating truth, this. And it reminds us that what's happening in this week's ruling--and in Buffalo, and in Uvalde, and in the next place, and the place after that--is designed to make us fearful. It's designed to keep us fighting one another. It's designed to make us wary of one another. That's how this Right Wing vision of America works. If we're so wary of one another, so traumatized that we don't do much except buy stuff...they've won. If we're so weary of the political madness, if we're so demoralized by the way a small minority controls and manipulates power at the highest levels that we don't engage in the political process...they've won. It's just about buying the next car, betting on the next Super Bowl, etc.
And that's why all this is about spirituality. Spirituality explores vitality and meaning. And these decisions are ripping hard at the vitality of our American life, the meaning of our democratic project. That's hurting all of us. And those of us committed to spiritual life, and spiritual communities, have a lot of hard work to do. To bind up the broken hearts. To repair the tattered fabric. To reawaken the spirituality of a people.
