This has been a week of sadness. Losing a friend to COVID-19, hearing about the death of a dear friend’s grandmother and then watching the horror of a police officer use excessive force and kill another member of not just the African American community, but a member of the body of Christ.
Communities are understandably outraged, although I pray for peace to regain the traction we all need right now.
This is a time for leadership and it is clear to me that we don’t have one at the helm. Not that this is a new revelation, by any means. Over 100,000 now dead because of a failure to react to the pandemic, a preference for economics over epidemiology and a clear attempt to deflect blame for all of it on an entire culture of people, show the self-centered idiocy that sits in the Oval Office and with those that support him.
Now to add to this, white supremacy begins to reek it’s ugly head into the fray once more, aided by the divisive nature of this administration’s desire to keep us afraid of one another and hoodwink us into thinking that law and order needs to be restored.
Undoubtedly, restoration is needed, but of another sort. We need to restore our country, our cities, ourselves to a holiness that enables each of us to see each other as sacred gifts. We need to move beyond “the red states and the blue states and remind ourselves that we are the United States of America” as a certain former President often reminded us. We need to recognize all people as we do ourselves and more importantly, for Christians, as we see Christ. In our midst, there are too many suffering Christs right now in need of not merely recognition, but restoration. Today we need to restore the dignity that God wills to each of us.
My dear colleague, Fr. Dave Dwyer, CSP had an excellent homily today on the breath of the Spirit….that we need to find this breath, enriching us with the peace, as well as the justice, that we so desperately need. So many of us just simply, can’t breathe right now. We need the spirit more than ever this Pentecost.