“A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.” — Jeremiah 31:15
It has become part of the annual back-to-school ritual. There’s the shopping for new clothes and school supplies, registering for classes and finding out who the teachers are, the smiling faces in the first-day-of-school photos. And soon after that, the first mass shooting and murders of the new school year.
This year that honor goes to Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. On this third day of their school year, as teachers and students gathered in worship at the adjoining church, bullets rang through the windows. By the time they stopped two children were dead, 17 other children and adults were wounded, and every child in America was reminded again that their lives are potentially at risk every time they go to school.
Now the weeping of the mothers and fathers of Minneapolis join the cries of Rachel, and the parents of Parkland, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Virginia Tech, and others too many to remember or count, whose children are no more.
And I am sure that once again, the so-called leaders of this country will not do a damn thing. No new gun laws will be passed. There will be wringing of hands about mental health by the same members of Congress who approved a budget cutting $1 billion in mental health services.
As our children are once again sacrificed on the altar of the great false god of the gun industry our politicians will offer their meaningless thoughts and prayers as they extend their hands to receive more blood money from the NRA.
Scripture’s Letter of James has this to say about empty prayers: “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace and keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?
“Faith, if it has no works, is dead.”
I imagine if James were writing today he would put it this way: “If your children are in danger and being killed in their classrooms and you say, ‘My thoughts and prayers are with you, while doing nothing to protect them, what is the good of that?
“Thoughts and prayers, if they have no works, are dead.”
So what do we do? We ask that question after every mass shooting. We have marched, and signed petitions, and written letters, and made phone calls to no avail. But we must continue to do so because to stop will be giving in to the evil that festers in the soul of this county.
And we weep. “Do not think of these as just somebody else’s kids,” Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey said this morning. “Think of this as if they were your own. Every one of us needs to be wrapping our arms around these families giving them every ounce that we muster. These were Minneapolis families. These were American families,” Frey said.
Lord, have mercy.
With love,
Tricia