{"id":53594,"date":"2024-03-19T14:59:44","date_gmt":"2024-03-19T14:59:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/forusa\/?p=53594"},"modified":"2024-03-25T22:15:34","modified_gmt":"2024-03-25T22:15:34","slug":"in-guns-we-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/forusa\/2024\/03\/in-guns-we-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"In guns we trust"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I grew up with guns \u2014 God and guns \u2014 in the evangelical Bible belt of East Tennessee. I have fond memories of hunting with my grandfather, and my dad was a veteran in Vietnam. Like many Christians in America, for much of my life I didn\u2019t see any contradiction between loving Jesus and loving guns. But in the late \u201890s I moved to Philadelphia, where I studied sociology and theology. I also fell in love with the north side of Philadelphia, where we\u2019ve been building a community, The Simple Way, for the past 25 years\u2026 and also where we\u2019ve seen far too many lives taken by guns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an old saying, \u201cWhere we sit determines what we see.\u201d Over the past couple of decades we\u2019ve seen so many lives lost to guns. One of them was Papito. I can remember hearing the pop of the gunshots, closer than usual, and came outside to find this young man collapsed in front of my house. He was still alive, fighting for every breath. I sat with him, prayed with him, as the ambulance came. We found out the next morning that Papito didn\u2019t make it. He was 19 years old. For me, that was the moment I said \u201cEnough.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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After Papito died, we held protests and vigils outside of some of the most notorious gun shops in Philadelphia, like the \u201cShooter Shop\u201d around the corner from my house. One of those protests was on Good Friday, when Christians around the globe remember the brutal death of Jesus on the cross. I will never forget that service. After the traditional reading of the Gospel, ending with the women weeping at the foot of the cross of the executed Jesus, we did something different. We invited the moms who had lost their kids to gun violence to share their stories \u2014 and, one after another, they did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something transcendent, mystical, happened that day. It was as if the tears of those women two thousand years ago met the tears of our mothers and fathers. The suffering of Christ met the suffering of Kensington, our neighborhood. After the service, a woman approached me, very passionate and shaken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI get it\u2026 I get it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I looked at her curiously, \u201cTell me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She went on, \u201cGod knows what it feels like to lose your son. God knows what it feels like to be me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In that moment I realized it was Papito\u2019s mother. And her statement \u201cGod knows what it feels like\u201d is one of the most powerful theological statements I\u2019ve ever heard\u2026 better than anything I learned in seminary (no offense, Princeton).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I begin with that story because grief and lament seem like the right place to start. It is also critical to remember that there is a God who is grieving with us, aching with us, raging with us, over the lives lost to gun violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n