Answering the Violence : Striving for harmony against a backdrop of gunfire

Passover began at sundown last Saturday. Holy Week began at sunrise last Sunday. Jews celebrated deliverance, Christians sang hosannas, and all dreamed of shalom.

Then followed Monday, when newspaper readers took a backward glance at the usual stories of weekend violence. Paralyzed, many shut both literal and figurative doors and huddled inside. Others went looking for the single, big explanation of the violent trends and, with it, the single, big cure.

One Los Angeles story went international. Two Japanese students were killed--not in urban-gang warfare but in a suburban shopping center. Their murders may cost billions, if fearful Japanese tourists avoid the violent metropolis in a violent nation. As Keisake Ozuwa said in Little Tokyo: “We have to be careful. We have to protect ourselves.” Stay inside.

In Chicago, careful and protective Pastor Jethro Ward Gayles did just that, to study his Sunday sermon. He was stabbed to death.

Twelve-year-old Burt Lancaster went outside to play, and was shot from a passing car. “Weekend of Gunfire Kills 10,” read the Monday headline in this city. A mother in Lancaster’s neighborhood announced the credible response: “I don’t let my kids outside.”

Violence, Americans used to think, occurred only far away. The Monday headlines reported on “Hate vs. Hate” in Hebron and “A Tale of Violence Swells in Zulu Area.” Now they cope with violence in the mall, the study, the front yard. Thirty years ago, people argued over whether violence was “as American as apple pie.” That argument is over. The wary eyes and pounding pulses of people who venture outside or huddle inside prove this.

Violence, Americans used to think, occurred only long ago. In his great “The Waning of the Middle Ages,” Johan Huizinga wrote of “life’s harsh and violent tenor.” The age of cathedrals and pious chants was the era of Crusades, inquisitions, rapacious feudal lords, the Black Death and warring knights. Huizinga chronicled Death’s macabre intrusions into the world of medieval dreams and ideals.

Enlightened, civil moderns later projected dreams and ideals of reason and nonviolence. But now “life’s harsh and violent tenor” and Death’s macabre intrusions would inspire a new book, “The Waning of the Modern Age.” What is there to do?

Millions could pray Psalm 140 with Gayles’ surviving congregation on Palm Sunday: “Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man; preserve me from the violent man.” A few would join them in praying for forgiveness for the violent one--as those mourners did. More keep asking for the single, big reason for the violence.

Some scientists declare that humans are descended from a particularly vicious simian strain. But why more viciousness now? Some Freudians offer their accounts of human destructiveness, but in what someone has called “the non-Freudian parts of the nation,” these do nothing to explain the current increase. Materialists say that hungry humans fight over scarce goods, but most people have been hungrier than Americans are in their now unprotected suburbs. The biblical story tells believers that ever since Cain and Abel, fallen humanity has been murderous. Why more so now and here?

The single, big explanation for some is the availability of guns. Guns kill. No, gun lovers say: People kill. No, people with guns kill. Or: The villain is the drug scene. The gang scene. TV, movies, rap music, advertising--note the cruel and menacing faces on the models--and other pop-culture destroyers make violence attractive. Retired football coach Tom Landry speaks for millions--he said, and they say, that the troubles started when, by ruling out school prayer, “They took God out of the schools.” Some trace it all to schools, for failing to discipline. Or, the family broke down; or the judicial system is too soft.

So, turn in the guns; turn off the television; turn up the volume of prayer; turn the key on more prisoners. Find the cure by rebuilding the school, the family. But just as no single explanation accounts for the mystery of the current violence, no single policy will cure its effects. Nothing will happen if, careful and protective as we understandably are, no one will “go outside” into the public sphere, where patient citizens have to put energies into all policies, and pursue even modest experiments.

In our kind of nation, there also have to be spiritual roots to causes and cures. Some seekers experiment with “staying inside,” to follow their private spiritual searches for harmony and peace. Others risk “going outside” to observe Passover and Holy Week in company and communion. Their critics argue that religion only increases violence. Where is shalom when extremists kill in the name of God and, close to home, faith fires those who kill at abortion clinics?

A few fault the originating stories of our faiths. Passover and Good Friday Scriptures speak of plagues and scourges, deaths of the first-born or an Only Son of God. Some claim there are substitute stories, perhaps from the realms of goddesses or angels, that would offer shalom without such violent images.

At a recent celebration, Union Theological Seminary Professor Delores Williams tried to shock the devout by rejecting the central event and symbol of Christianity: “I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff.” A Union student defended her: In their telling, here is a “Father-God” who willfully kills his own child in the Crucifixion. Won’t the retelling of that parental murder spread abuse against women and children?

Millions, billions have never heard the Christian narrative as a story of parental murder. One has overcome story with story.

This Union Seminary account would be weird in the ears of the forgivers in Gayles’ congregation, at the burials of child victims, among resolute men and women, wherever believers need comfort or work for nonviolence. For most, the point of the Crucifixion is that in it, God suffers with humanity. Weird stuff that, says the rationalist--but it inspires those who draw strength from a suffering God in their suffering world; a God who impels them to “go outside” and seek responsible ways to promote nonviolence.

At Passover and in Holy Week one looks for hope and needs resolve. Two generations ago, Huizinga fought the pessimism that paralyzed violent Europe: “We do not want to go down. With all its misery, this world is too beautiful to let it sink into a night of human degeneration and blindness of the spirit.”

“We do not want to go down.”

There is no substitute for readying oneself psychologically for an ever less secure, less protected world. Those who do not want to go down will seek realistic outcomes to match the dreams that come with the old stories. The line from the prophet Zechariah sounds utopian but inspires concrete action: “And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.”

“We do not want to go down.” With such resolve, parents and teachers can learn and then teach civility in the vandalized suburbs. Not wanting to go down will mean not wanting to celebrate violence in the media. It means displaying the courage to make heroes of the nonviolent, the patience to begin with even small gains against the darkness.

Affirming the beauty of the nonviolent in a world of misery is a first step for citizens as they counter the barbarians who want us to “stay inside” and leave the streets to them.

It will inspire people as they “go outside” to pursue a policy or, better, a thousand policy moves against the “harsh and violent tenor of life,” in pursuit of the shalom one hears promised at Passover or in Holy Week.