We have been meditating on God as Love and Compassion and Justice. Another way to say this is that when we are busy loving or doing compassion or caring or bringing about justice and fairness and therefore standing up to injustice, we are bringing the divine into our world.
Yesterday we meditated on how Heschel calls God the ground of conscience and transcendence that challenges us. What happened in yesterday’s school murders was a failure in both conscience and challenging transcendence.
Yesterday’s latest school shooting is the opposite of bringing the divine into the world–or love or compassion or justice. Or conscience. The woman who jumped in front of the TV news cameras in Nashville where the shooting took place to plead with us to STOP the shootings spoke from her heart and her experience of losing a child at Sandyhook school over ten years ago.
The Brian Tyler Cohen video I share reminds us that the United States, which constitutes 5% of the world’s population, owns 50% of the world’s guns! Why might that be? Because politicians who are in bed with gun manufacturers prefer money from them to caring about children. To please those who pay them, they prevent common sense laws that majority of Americans of both parties and none–including gun-owners –want enacted. Such basic things as a ban on assault weapons (meant for soldiers in battle); locking up guns in homes; and more serious background checks.
All this link between gun money and politicians shines a light on the decadence of a political system built on dark and untraceable money, buttressed by a depraved Supreme Court that has encouraged unchecked dark money in our political system. All of which gives capitalism a very bad name indeed.
Greed and the quest for power take precedence over the lives of children. Guns are the new “golden calf” in America. An object of worship. Idolatry is alive and well wherever addictions reign.
Kids are “unregarded” (see Rabbi Heschel in yesterday’s DM) while guns, power and greed are overly regarded in today’s America.
Such a society has banished a sense of the common good and “respect for life” and love of children. It is Adultism writ large. Does the new political slogan “parents rights” include banning guns that kill children in schools? And voting out politicians who refuse to pass common sense gun legislation?
See Matthew Fox, Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the Unnameable God, pp. 47-51.
To read the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video teaching, click HERE.
Banner: “USA Gun” by AK Rockefeller is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Queries for Contemplation
Be with the mother’s passion in the YouTube link above. Let it spark your passion and compassion.
Recommended Reading
Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God …Including the Unnameable God
Too often, notions of God have been used as a means to control and to promote a narrow worldview. In Naming the Unnameable, renowned theologian and author Matthew Fox ignites our imaginations by offering a colorful range of Divine Names gathered from scientists and poets and mystics past and present, inviting us to always begin where true spirituality begins: from experience.
“This book is timely, important and admirably brief; it is also open ended—there are always more names to come, and none can exhaust God’s nature.” -Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, author of Science Set Free and The Presence of the Past
9 thoughts on “Today’s USA: Kids as “Unregarded,” Guns as Overly Regarded”
My heart goes out to victims past, present and those to come. The situation is highly volatile and is moving towards getting worse in numbers and frequency without a clear end in site. Greed is one culprit but the twisting of logic and reason, and perpetuating falsehoods are others among many. The two party political system in the US has become radicalized. There is always ‘a third way’ and what it will take is a 3rd political party to bring change about. The everyday people need ‘a voice’ and not more divisiveness nor the needless pain and suffering that we see being inflicted on the innocent. — BB.
Luke 11:19
Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them, “Every kingdom [house] divided against itself will be laid waste, and a house divided against a house will fall.”
A prophetic poem:
The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Gwen, To me the part that rings true to me in Yeats poem are the words:
“The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”
That is the problem as far as I can see…
Richard, I agree with you. Yeats’ prophetic description of the ultimate consequences of the ‘centre not holding’…
I remember that poem very well.
Etty Hillsum wrote in her diary, profound insights on living in the midst of suffering.
“Dear God, these are anxious times. I lay in the dark, with burning eyes, as scene after scene of human suffering passes before me. I shall try to help You God, to stop my strength from ebbing away. One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us… that it is we that must help You God, to help ourselves!
What matters, is that we safeguard that little of You God, in ourselves and in others. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You, Yourself God, can do about our circumstances, our lives. Neither do I hold You God, responsible.
You cannot help us, but we must help You God, by defending Your dwelling place inside us, to the last. Hope, is not asking You God, to do something… but rather Hope is us doing something for You God. This something we must do, is to welcome the nature of Your love, compassion and mercy into our lives. We are the instruments, our hearts are the converging point, of You God, breaking open into that which causes all suffering. We are the priveleged bearers of Your love, compassion and mercy; unfolding, evolving and emerging into this suffering world.”
Both videos in today’s DM are highly recommended as Matthew says that express the sadness, anger, and moral outrage most of us feel about the ignorance, addiction, greed, and selfish cold heartedness of many Americans and politicians about preferring their gun rights to children’s lives. Tragically, American history, society, culture, and capitalism have a long history, at least to the beginnings of American colonialism/imperialism, of violence and destruction on the original indigenous American natives and slavery/racism toward Blacks uprooted from their native countries/cultures. This conditioned greed, violence, ignorance, and racism still exists among American society, much of it institutionalized, and also in the unconscious/conditioned hearts and minds of many Americans!
Some of these shadow qualities of human nature and economic capitalism also exist in other modern industrial societies causing historically destructive social inequities and ecocide of sacred Mother Nature and our planet. In our human spiritual evolution, we are going through a deep spiritual purification and transformation, personal, societal, and planetary….
🔥💜🌎🙏
This abomination goes a lot deeper than mere greed and graft. Supporters of murdering children through unlimited and unregulated arming of the citizenry have long announced fierce opposition to democracy and their intent to replace it with libertarian theocracy.
Focus is on the GOP, but no Democrat in Congress is passionately, daily, denouncing it and silence is support.
Anti-Christ churches overtly nourish it, being actively involved in their effort to destroy the republic—something publicly advocated for decades.
Detailed proof is found in Onishi’s book, “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism–And What Comes Next.”
Make no mistake. This is Civil War II—but we the people encourage the pretense that these insurrectionists merely embrace a political difference. Not so. We ignore this fact at our own peril. The murder of children is allowed in order to create a division that will ultimately lead to the population begging for totalitarian control in any form in order to protect the children they love.
You comment is very insightful, Olive !!!