What have we become?

I live just over a mile from Annunciation Church and School. Yesterday morning I ate breakfast in the garden to the repeating sound of police and ambulance sirens and the whir of helicopter rotors. Clearly something disastrous was occurring, so we were reading the news within 10 minutes of the beginning posts. I am not sure how to write down what this made me feel like, not sure I can. Something was crushed inside my chest that so much carnage has gone on in my home city in the last 36 hours, that little kids were shot to death in a place of worship. Any place of worship. I walked around all day in a stupor, not sure how to move it. I'm still not sure. 

I needed to know that my own estranged children were ok and texted them, even though I knew there was no reason they would be close to the shooting. While only one responded, he did so, reassuring me of the others' safety and well-being. Not so for the mother at the hospital screaming to find her injured daughter. What angst has she and is she enduring?

And what angst caused this young person to commit such a heinous act? What deep wounds to their soul have we inflicted upon them as a society that they would lash out in such a fashion? How do we help others avoid this same fate?

I visit the impoverished parts of town to take the pittance of help I can afford and am laid low by the talking blankets of despair, the prostitutes literally clothed in sack cloth. What century is this? Have we all fallen into some time warp where individual humans have no value? How do we move beyond our greed, all of us, including me, and open our hands to help those that have so much less, and so little hope? Move to meeting each others' needs rather than all of our own wants?

And for me the beginning of hope comes in the form of a prayer, that while I cannot do much, I will strive to do what I can. 

Make sure at least some of my money is invested at the local credit union to help my neighbors. 

Clothe and feed the beggars I have an on going relationship with at my local grocery store corner. 

Listen to my neighbors, especially when they are voicing their own pain and despair, while still being aware that sometimes I cannot bear any more pain and honoring where I am.

Cleaning up the streets as I walk and protecting the water I live around by asking questions about the hazardous waste I see that can hurt it via the gutters.

 

All of us have this capacity, the capacity to make change by simply changing small habits in ourselves.

kindness

openness

forgiveness

thankfulness

 

By striving everyday to be a little more human, a little more humane with each other.

May it be so.