Knocking on Heaven's Door

Kaylin Gillis, Ralph Yarl, and the guns we buy rather than heal our broken trust

I had another post written to share with you all today; ironically it was about malls and social isolation, and the last thing I wanted to do was to scrap that post at the last minute and write another post about another shooting, after just writing last week about the late March school shooting in Nashville and our ongoing addiction in America to gun violence.

But I read on Monday about Ralph Yarl in Kansas City, Mo., and Kaylin Gillis in rural New York, and since then I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them.

Just now when I put in the links to their stories, at first I thought I posted the wrong link to the wrong story, because the headlines are so similar. A young American full of promise: Ralph only a teenager, Kaylin just 20 years old; approaches the home of a stranger, both by mistake.

Both are met at the front door: Ralph on foot, Kaylin in a car; by elderly white men firing guns.

Kaylin loses her life.

Ralph escapes, barely, with his, and he’s recovering at home surrounded by medical professionals in his family, after being released from the hospital on Sunday.

Kaylin Gillis GoFundMe - Ralph Yarl GoFundMe

I guess it’s easy to get mired in the details of both cases. Ralph’s case in particular strikes at the heart of America’s oldest sins: racism, violence, bloodlust, and capriciousness. The fact that Ralph was just 16 years old when he walked up to 84-year-old Andrew Lester’s front door, mistakenly going to 115th Street instead of 115th Terrace in middle-class, Midwestern north Kansas City, a place I’ve been a time or two, not far from where my mom and my husband grew up. The aching wound of racist hate that causes white people to see innocent young Black boys and Black men as a threat, a generational sin and curse that leads to the Talk and Michael Brown, in Ferguson, on the other side of the state from where Ralph was shot; and George Floyd and Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray and the Charleston 9 and the Buffalo 10 and the more than 4,400 Black people memorialized in Montgomery, Ala., at the national lynching memorial.

Miraculously, Ralph lives.

Kaylin, like far too many other young American women, dies, at the hands of a violent man.

It begins to feel like loving children and young people in America is like placing your most precious human beings on a roulette wheel, and spinning it, each morning as you send them off in a school bus, or on a bike, or walking in the neighborhood to pick up their younger brothers at a sleepover.

My God, it is so crushing.

My God, My God, why have you forsaken us?

Meanwhile, closer to home, in the next town over from the church where I used to pastor in rural Minnesota, our local newspaper wrote an ill-advised story celebrating town fundraisers for “guns and purses.”

If you google the town name and guns, underneath the smiling photos of bearded white men holding firearms, you’ll see the news of the arrest of 23-year-old Kevin Uriel Zelaya Asencio, a town resident who shot and killed his 20-year-old coworker in a supposed love triangle dispute less than a month ago.

But yeah, let’s auction off more guns. More blood money for municipalities.

I always feel compelled at this point in the article to tell you that I love people who own guns, people who take their teenagers deer hunting and proudly show me photos of the buck they shot last weekend. People who served in the military and people who work in law enforcement.

For too long we have neglected to distinguish in America between those who own guns and those who worship and love their guns. I wrote about this dividing line in my chapter on guns and right-wing Christian leaders in my book, Red State Christians. You can read an excerpt of that chapter here from Sojourners magazine.

I always tell people that I’ve never felt more fear as a reporter than I did sitting in that church outside Tampa, on Youth Night, where the pastors advertised that they carried guns to lead worship, and teenagers fell over outside a big bonfire in the humid Florida air, at least for the moment slain in the Spirit and not slain, like their siblings on the other side of the state, in a school shooting.

It’s not the guns it’s us and the guns. But we couldn’t kill each other like we do without them.

Maybe that’s why these two stories, of Kaylin and Ralph, are haunting me so much today that I missed my self-imposed article deadline to write this to you today - rather than a week ahead as I ordinarily do.

It’s because what happened to them, and what’s happening to us as a nation, represents such a clear break in the social contract, a cleavage in the bonds that once bound us to one another, and gave us hope and compassion even in the face of the American sins and -isms that have been with us since the beginning.

I fear we have so frayed that hope, that compassion, that trust - that it’s almost gone. Broken. And in its wake are terrified citizens, pulling out our guns and shooting indiscriminately into a mirror.

We dare not call ourselves Christians, dare not claim that we follow a Savior who promised to beat swords into plowshares. We are not peacemakers. Rather, we engineer, build, market, protect, and sell the most efficient killing machines on the planet, devised specifically to tear each other to shreds.

When I think about Ralph and Kaylin, I remember a time when I was about the same age as they are. I was 17, and I hadn’t had my license a full year yet. I was driving, somewhere, maybe from work to a friend’s house or something, and I was only a few miles from my house, in the neighboring town over.

I was driving my dad’s 1989 Buick Century with the big maroon doors and cushy beige seats. Man, that car was as comfortable as it was lumbering.

For some reason, even though I was close to home, I’d gotten lost. I couldn’t remember where I was going, and in this age before smartphones, I did what seemed to me then to be prudent. I pulled into a church parking lot, thinking I’d be able to go and ask directions. Remember when we used to have to ask each other directions? Remember the jokes about how the wife always urged the husband to ask, but he didn’t, and then they were lost for hours on country roads, until he finally pulled into a gas station? Remember when we had to trust each other? And look for the big red barn up ahead on the right?

Anyway, I walked up to the church door and pulled. Locked. Dark. No one in sight.

At this point I realized that not only was I lost, but I had locked the car keys inside the car. I had no phone. No keys.

Like Kaylin and Ralph, I was in a neighborhood that wasn’t my own - full of strangers’ homes - but I wasn’t entirely ill-at-ease. I wasn’t too far from home. I walked across to the other side of the road from the church, full of 90s-era suburban homes. I remember that I walked up to the front door of the closest home on the street, and then things get fuzzy.

Did I knock?

Ring the doorbell?

I honestly don’t remember, because my story didn’t make the news. The homeowner didn’t shoot me in the face. The neighbors didn’t turn me away from three houses only to demand that I, bloodied and tearful, get on the ground and put my hands in the air, as his Kansas City neighbors did to 16-year-old Ralph.

The homeowner didn’t fire, and fire again, until I was dead, like they did to 20-year-old Kaylin, who was just out with her friends on a Saturday night.

Instead, I imagine, I asked to use the phone. The homeowner came downstairs with a circa-2000 cordless phone with a big metal antenna. I called my house. My dad drove over with the spare keys, and I went home. Free to live. To laugh. To hug. To have babies. To write this here to you today.

Something is terribly broken today, and it’s been broken for a long time now, and it’s getting worse instead of better. It’s us, and it’s the guns. We don’t trust each other. Some of us have spent decades watching fear-mongering cable news that demonizes Black and brown people, and suggests we have to arm ourselves against some kind of potential war or invasion, whether the topic is immigration or crime. We’ve lost our tenuous hold on the belief that someday we can live peacefully in our homes and have families and not wed ourselves to our work, and not drown under the suffocating load of debt and inflation and the poverty and homelessness next door.

We buy guns in the face of this broken social contract like we bought tie-dye lounge sets in the face of a global pandemic. Fix something; buy something. It’s the American way. Except our lounge sets and jumbo packs of toilet paper won’t kill us.

For more of my writing and advocacy for common-sense gun restrictions especially to protect schools, teachers, and children, here’s what I wrote after the Uvalde shooting.

A Few Notes …

First, a huge THANK YOU to all subscribers. I get a little email notification every time someone signs up, and every time I get one, I feel joyful and honored that you want to spend part of your day with this community. I mean it when I say: “I’m listening,” to you as well, and please don’t hesitate to share with me your thoughts + ideas for what you’d like to read in this space.

To PAID SUBSCRIBERS: I am humbled and honored that you’ve chosen to spend part of your limited budget on this newsletter. To borrow words from another newsletter I love, you are directly funding freelance journalism with your subscription, and I have to thank you more than ever for your continued support. Our world’s media and journalism is in a state of crisis, with fewer and fewer billionaires in control of global news outlets, and journalists being either laid off or threatened with violence for their work every single day; with fewer and fewer newsroom positions paying a living wage. I pledge to you to steward your paid subscription faithfully + use it to support honest, hard-working, and LOCAL journalism. One of my goals in this first year is to open this newsletter to other journalists, and pay them a fair wage for their work.

THANK YOU for your support. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.

On free vs. paid-subscriber posts only: My plan right now is that the Friday + Sunday posts, focusing on news + spirituality, in that order, are available for paid subscribers only (after this first week). My plan is that the Tuesday blog-style posts will always be free, to enable as much access as possible, while creating a smaller and more intimate experience for paid subscribers, who are also able to comment and share in community in fuller ways.

Free Trial: Substack always offers a free week-long trial subscription to this newsletter, so you can get a taste of the Friday + Sunday posts and see if you’d like to subscribe!

If a paid subscription is a hardship for you, but you’d like access to the Friday + Sunday posts: PLEASE do not hesitate to reach out. I will be happy to provide a complimentary subscription for you.