Two days after the massacre of children in Uwalde, Texas, and 12 days after the racist massacre in Buffalo, Chanxing Khan, a priest and teacher, told a Buddhist parable.
A man was shot with a poison arrow, Ms. Khan said as she drove a group of high school seniors to a Thai temple in Massachusetts.
The arrow piercing his flesh, the man demands answers. What kind of arrow is it? Who fired the arrow? What poison is this? What feathers are there on an arrow, a peacock or a hawk?
But all these questions are meaningless, the Buddha tells his disciple. The important thing is to remove this poison arrow and take care of the wound.
“We must be moved by the pain of all the suffering. But it is important that we are not paralyzed by this, “said Ms Hahn. “It makes us value life because we understand that life is very precious, life is very short, it can be destroyed in an instant.
The last few days have revealed an arrow stuck deep in the heart of America. It was uncovered in the massacre of 19 children in a primary school and two teachers in Uwalde, and when a gunman immersed in a white supremacy ideology killed 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket. The United States is a nation that has learned to live by mass shooting after mass shooting.
And there are other arrows that have become commonplace. More than a million people have died from Covid, a once unimaginable figure. The virus is now the third leading cause of death, even with vaccines in one of the world’s most medically developed countries. The increase in drug deaths, combined with Covid, has reduced overall life expectancy in America to an unprecedented level since World War II. Police killings of unarmed black men continue long-held oaths of reform.
The mountain of disaster and paralysis on how to overcome it points to a nation struggling on some fundamental issues: Has our tolerance as a country to such horror grown, wiping the dust of one event before moving on to the next? How much value do we attach to a human life?
Isn’t there a fee that is too high?
After Uwalde, many Americans went deep to find answers. Rabbi Michal B. Springer, manager of clinical pastoral education at New York Presbyterian Hospital, has discovered that he is returning to an ancient Hebrew letter in the Mishnah, which says that when God began to create, God created one man.
“The teaching is that every person is so precious that the whole world is contained in this person, and we must honor this person completely and completely,” she said. “If one person dies, the whole world dies, and if one person is saved, then the whole world is saved.”
We can appreciate life only if we are ready to truly grieve, to face the reality of suffering, she said. She quotes a verse from weeping, the opening line of Psalm 13: “How long, Lord?”
“It’s not that we don’t care. “We have reached the limit of how much we can cry and hurt,” she said. “It simply came to our notice then. We must value every life as a whole world and be willing to weep over what it means to have the whole world lost. ”
Instead of mourning together and taking collective action, however, every crisis now seems to be sending the country deeper into division and struggling to respond.
The human brain mourns the death of a loved one in a different way than the death of people we don’t know, and in a crisis, grief is not our only feeling, said Mary-Francis O’Connor, an associate professor of clinical psychology and psychiatry at the University of Arizona. studies the relationship between the brain and grief.
“You can’t underestimate the need for belonging,” she said. When something terrible happens, people want to connect with their “in-group,” she said, where they feel they belong, which can push people into guerrilla camps.
In recent decades, Americans have lived in a time of reduced affiliation as trust in religious organizations, community groups, and institutions as a whole declines. Appreciating life and working for healing means going beyond yourself and your own group, she said.
“This will require collective action,” she said. “And part of the problem is that we’re very divided right now.”
The question of the value of life appears in some of the country’s most intense debates, such as abortion. Millions of Americans believe that repealing Roe against Wade will increase the value of life. Others believe that this would undermine the value of women’s lives.
American culture often puts individual freedom above collective needs. But in the end, people are born to care for others and not to be converted, said the Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeois, an episcopal priest and teacher of mystical theology. She pondered the countless crises as the clouds engulfed Maine’s spring day.
“Human beings are born for meaning,” she said. “We have very, very big souls. We are born for generosity, we are born for compassion. “
What stands in the way of a proper assessment of life, she said, is “our very, very upset relationship with death.”
In the United States, denial of death has reached its final form, she said, with many focusing on themselves to avoid the fear of death.
This fear cuts through “all the knots of conscience, the common good and the ability to act together,” she said, “because we eventually became animals saving our own skin, the way we seem to save our own skin is repression and dissociation. “
The United States is extraordinary in terms of the level of gun violence it tolerates. The speed and severity of mass shootings are unparalleled in a world outside conflict zones.
America has a “love affair with violence,” said Phyllis Isabella Shepard. She heads the James Lawson Institute for Research and Research on Nonviolent Movements at Vanderbilt University, named after the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a civil rights leader who was expelled from the university in 1960 for his role in lunch at the Ins.
Violence is almost a normal part of life in the United States, she said, and evaluating life requires me to constantly ask myself, how am I committed to nonviolence today? It also means giving up some things, she said – many people think of themselves as nonviolent, but consume violence in entertainment.
“The question that should scare us is what will be needed to get us to make this change collectively?” She said.
“Maybe this is the work of our lives,” she said. “Maybe that’s our job as people.”
When Tracy K. Smith, the former United States poet, first heard about the Buffalo and Uwalde shootings, her immediate reaction was anger and rage against “these monstrous people.” It’s easy to sink into that feeling, she said, and we’re even encouraged to think it’s a “wild emergency.”
“But when I slow down, I realize that there is something alive in our culture that has harmed these people,” she said. “Whatever this thing is, it harms us all, we are all vulnerable to it, it exerts some influence on us, no matter who we are.
After graduating from Harvard University on Thursday, she read a poem. It was a reflection on history, the violence we live with, and what age requires, she said. In her version of the poem, she thinks of her children, she said, but it is also a wish for her students. So many have dealt with so much in recent years, being sick, caring for family members.
“I want you to survive,” she said. “I want your bodies to be inviolable. I want the earth to be inviolable. ”
“It’s a wish or a prayer.”
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