Making sense of new life

After a school shooting ...

By the time you read this, two weeks will have passed since I wrote it.

You will have celebrated the resurrection and new life and colored eggs of Easter. American Christians will have rejoiced and donned white dresses and pastel pants and blithely sung: Jesus Christ is Ris’n Today - Alleluia!

Traditionally the church puts away the alleluias during the 40 days of Lent, and then they come out again in full force on Easter morning.

It feels good to celebrate.

It feels good to sing, as I have in churches in the past: “Our God is greater. Our God is stronger. Our God is higher than any other …”

But I don’t know. Today, as I write this to you still deep in the season of Lent, I feel a need to remind American Christians, and even my future, post-Easter self - that Jesus would likely offer a very different message than the powerful, awesome, perfect God we sing about in so many churches.

The thing about Jesus’ death on the Cross is that it told us in fact that, rather than being “higher than any other” our God went lower. Our God was weaker. Our God was scorned and rejected and arrested and chained and crucified, a means of capital punishment enacted on common criminals and political prisoners alike.

I wrote this post to you, two weeks ago, in the midst of Lent and the day after a school shooting at a Christian church-based private school in Nashville.

Three school staff members and three 9-year-old students were killed by a 28-year-old former student of the school.

Photo by John Amis, Associated Press

And I’ll forgive you - and my future self - if you’re reading this and going, “Wait. Oh my gosh. I forgot about that.”

Because our news cycle runs so fast and God forbid we’ve had another mass shooting since I wrote this two weeks ago (sadly - I’m editing this post on Monday afternoon, and there was a mass shooting in Louisville, Ky., today. Four people are dead). Also since writing this post, two Black Tennessee legislators, from Nashville and Memphis, were effectively kicked out of the Tennessee legislature for their advocacy for gun control measures. Their requisite witness and protest has been courageous in the face of such violent and angry resistance.

I am writing you from today, two weeks ago for you, March 28, 2023, and the wound is still fresh. This morning I sent my 7-year-old to the bus stop and my 10-year-old walked to school, turtling under his backpack filled with books and balls for recess and a lunch he packed himself.

Today I also spent the day at school, filling in as a substitute as I occasionally do for our neighborhood schools. I taught P.E. to third and fourth graders today. We played Hot Foot (you might know it as Pin Guard), and I evaluated their jump-roping skills.

I watched as a 9-year-old tried mightily to get down the single rebound forward jump rope for 10 times in a row. He went ultra slow: 6 … 7… 8 … then his shoelaces got tangled and his long reddish hair flopped in his face.

His face crumpled.

“Go practice and try again,” I said, smiling hopefully encouragingly.

He walked away and dutifully practiced.

The line wound on, and I saw kids’ faces light up as they mastered another skill or tried something they hadn’t done before.

That same 9-year-old came up again. This time, slowly again, he made it 10 times in a row. I checked off the box with a marker and made a note on the class list, as I had for everyone else. He beamed.

After 45 minutes, it was time to clean up and get ready to play a quick favorite tag game before returning to homeroom. I watched as the kids ran past me in a blur, putting their red-and-white plastic jump ropes up around an ancient metal carrier that had probably been there for 50 years.

None of the equipment was new. This was an underfunded urban school district that went on strike for three weeks last year just to get enough money to pay their teachers and staff a living wage.

Still, the kids were so happy. They seemed to have springs in their shoes.

Then the thought struck me. Against my will, I imagined these same kids (and me: one of the Nashville victims was a substitute teacher) crouching in the corner of the gymnasium, a terribly open space, with nowhere to hide, to be trapped, cornered, as a mass shooter entered the building, right by the front door.

Where would we go? What would we do? Would we scream? Go silent? Would they go into autopilot and execute the drills they’d practiced since kindergarten? Would blood drip on the ground? Would I try and fight? Would I cower and fail and abandon the kids?

The thought of these joyous, infectious, laughing days being turned into death and destruction made me unable to come home and write to you - for a post two weeks later - after Easter - about anything but this.

Maybe because you and I will be able to read it and hear it differently two weeks later. Maybe the trauma won’t be so fresh and we’ll be able to think of new and better solutions (ban assault rifles now), or maybe we will just be able to read it and not collapse on the floor in a heap of stifled tears and fears and the feeling, as a parent, that there’s absolutely nothing you can do to protect your kids.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s that out-of-control scared feeling that’s leading some parents to apparently go off the deep end and resort to banning books and promoting hate against LGBTQ people and trans kids. Maybe they think if we just have “parents’ rights” and don’t talk about the reality of racism in America that somehow their kids will be OK.

But the truth is none of us are OK, and we won’t be OK as long as we only think of protecting our kids and not just humanity in general.

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.

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