A happy funeral . . . and then bloody reality

I helped at and attended a happy funeral on Saturday, May 6. 

Then I came home and was slapped in the face with bloody reality. 

First, the funeral; then, the bloody reality.

My husband and I, on May 6, spent four hours at our church helping to set up and clean up for a funeral. In between, we attended the funeral. 

It was the happiest funeral I'd ever attended. 

Not because we were happy the deceased was no longer with us, but because we were celebrating a life that was lived well.

Keith Johnson attended my church for a number of years, and among other things, he sang on our church's praise team. Fewer people had a wider smile than Keith, and fewer people could encourage you like he could. So I think it was appropriate that the funeral began with a video clip of the three Johnson brothers, including Keith, singing "Mansion, Robe and Crown" at their father's funeral. 

Brother #1 ratted out brother #2 by telling of a time when brother #2 would "terrorize" baby Keith. One day, Keith settled the matter by taking a Fisher-Price toy and bopping brother #2 on the side of the head. Problem solved.

Later in the funeral, tears surfaced as one of the two brothers stopped in the middle of his speech.  The other brother came up to give him silent encouragement and the speaker was finally able to go on. 

Tears also surfaced when one of Keith's daughters spoke of what a wonderful father he was to her. Another daughter shared the same sentiments. 

Keith had been an athlete throughout his childhood and high school. But he developed heart problems in his life, and then later, cancer hit and eventually killed him. 

Despite his heart problems, I never heard Keith complain. He continued to greet everyone with a smile, and Don, our preacher, spoke about how Keith did the encouraging when Don would ask how he, Keith, was doing. 

I enjoyed the genuine affection and love the family had for each other and for Keith.  And not only did his family have that genuine affection, so did his friends.  So many people that I had not seen in months and years came to our church to honor Keith. 

That attitude of respect and affection overflowed into the reception after the funeral. Volunteers made sure that our fellowship hall was set up and filled with food. And we left plenty over for the family (I said to several people, they will not feel like cooking for the next few days.)  At one point, an elderly couple came up to my husband and me (we happened to be standing at the pass-through between the kitchen and the fellowship hall) and wanted to know if we were in charge of the operation.  We looked at each other and said, "Well . . ." The man went on to compliment everything as a "well-oiled machine".  I said, "Keith loved us, and this was our way of loving him back." (I immediately went to the elder's wife that was mainly in charge of asking for volunteers and told him what he'd said. She was one of those people responsible for that "well-oiled machine".) 

Exhausted after four hours of serving, my husband and I elected to forego cooking and picked up dinner from Chick-Fil-A. 

It was after I ate and was checking my phone for Kentucky Derby results that the first reports came in of a shooting in Allen, Texas, at a shopping mall.  I'm ashamed to admit that my reaction at first was, "Again?" It's mid-May and I have already lost count of the number of mass shootings there have been in this country. Midtown Atlanta, about 20 miles from where I live, had their own on May 3rd, just three days prior. 

Then I started seeing the casualty reports:   Nine dead, including the shooter; and at least seven wounded. 

And some of them were children. 

I turned to Twitter, which is often where I get my breaking news these days (which may or may not be a good thing). 

In the tweets dealing with the Allen shooting, I saw approximately 5-10 seconds of a video I wasn't sure was real:  a group lying on the ground, blood smearing at least one person's legs, and a face that I am not sure was open in an eternal, permanent scream, or that had the lower half of it blown away. This is allegedly a video taken of certain victims at the Allen mall, a very graphic and gruesome video that probably should not have been on Twitter in the first place and that took over 24 hours to get taken down. 

From a happy funeral, where I was reminded of the value of a life well-lived, I was plunged back into the bloody reality of sudden, violent, needless death. 

What more can I say? What more can anyone say? 

I refuse to say "thoughts and prayers" (although I believe prayers can help), but we're thinking and praying when we ought to be acting. 

I don't have solutions.

I'm at the age where I'm going to more funerals than I am baby showers and weddings. When I go to funerals, I want them to be "happy funerals", i.e. funerals that truly are a celebration of someone's life, where the preacher doesn't have to lie or gloss over the bad parts of your life.  

I do not want to go to a funeral that, while it may be a celebration of a life well-lived, was caused by someone who, for whatever reason, took a deadly weapon and senselessly murdered eight people, wounded seven others, and whose bloody reality was splattered all over social media for the world to see. 

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

And now it's our turn

This speech is from the Congressional Record of May 3, 2023, p. S1489.  The formatting is mine. Any emphasis is mine. All the words belong to Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock.

 Madam President, I rise today in shock and sorrow and in grief for my home State. And, if I am honest, I rise really with a deep sense of anger about what is happening in our country in the area of gun violence and death.

I stood here in March of 2021 after a gunman went on a rampage across Metro Atlanta and snatched eight precious souls—people with families and friends who loved them dearly. And here I am standing again, this time with the tragedy having occurred in midtown Atlanta, right in my own backyard. 

While this is still a developing situation, according to media reports, so far, at least five people were shot— five—on a random afternoon. There has been one fatality. The others were taken to the hospital. 

I want to take a moment and thank law enforcement officials for keeping us as safe as they can. I want to thank them for their work trying to apprehend this individual. 

I am also thankful for local media who are keeping all of us informed, and I am grateful for our first responders, the people in healthcare, the people on the front lines. We count on them every day to care for those who are injured, to respond to people in peril.  

That is what makes this particular shooting ironic and deeply upsetting, because it underscores the fact that none of us is safe no matter where we are. This happened in a medical facility where people are trying to find healing.r

So I want to underscore that, because there have been so many mass shootings—in fact, about one every day in this country this year—that, tragically, we act as if this is routine. We behave as if this is normal. It is not normal. It is not right for us to live in a nation where nobody is safe no matter where they are. We are not safe in our schools; we are not safe in our workplaces; we are not safe at the grocery store; we are not safe at movie theaters; we are not safe at spas; we are not safe in our houses of worship. There is no sanctuary in the sanctuary. We are not safe at concerts; we are not safe at banks; we are not safe at parades; we are not safe in our own yards and in our own homes. Now, today, we can add medical facilities to that list. 

And, still, we have done so very little in this building to respond—and in the American political square at large. I think there is an unspoken assumption. I think that the unspoken assumption is that ‘‘This can’t happen to me. This won’t happen to me. It won’t happen to people that I love.’’ But, with a mass shooting every day, the truth is the chances are great.  

I shudder to say it, but the truth is, in a real sense, it is only a matter of time that this kind of tragedy comes knocking on your door. Then, in a deeper sense, I think it is important for us to recognize that it is already happening to you. You may not be the victim of a mass shooting. You may not know anyone who is the victim of a mass shooting yet, but in a real sense, it is already happening to all of us.  

Dr. King was right: We are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. This is knocking on all of our doors, and I feel this this afternoon in a very real sense—I feel it in my bones—because my own two children were on lockdown this afternoon. I have two small children, and their schools are on lockdown in response to this tragedy. They are there. I am here. I am hoping and praying that they are safe, but the truth is none of us are safe.  

As a pastor, I am praying for those who are affected by this tragedy, but I hasten to say that thoughts and prayers are not enough. In fact, it is a contradiction to say that you are thinking and praying and then doing nothing. It is to make a mockery of prayer. It is to trivialize faith. We pray not only with our lips; we pray with our legs. We pray by taking action. Still there are those who want to convince us that this is the cost of freedom. To them, we have to say no.  This ongoing, slow-moving tragedy in our country—mass shootings as routine—is not the cost of freedom; it is the cost of blind obstinance, a refusal to change course even when the evidence suggests we must do something different. It is the cost of demagoguery--those who want to convince us that commonsense gun reform is somehow a call to take everybody’s guns. This is not the cost of freedom. Dare I say it is the cost of greed—gun lobbyists willing to line their pockets even at the cost of our children.

 And so we must act.

 I am proud of the fact that we did, after 30 years, pass some gun safety legislation here in the last Congress. It was a significant piece of legislation, but, obviously, it was not enough.

There are 87 percent or more of Americans who believe that we ought to have universal background checks, and still we can’t get it. Think about that. In a country where everybody says we are divided—and there are deep divisions, to be sure. There is disagreement on this issue, to be sure. But in a country where there is 87-percent agreement on something, there is no movement on it in Congress, which means that that is a problem with our democracy. The people’s voices have been squeezed out of their democracy, and there is a growing chasm between what the people actually want and what they can get from their government. We saw it in a stark and ugly way a few weeks ago when we had two brave, young legislators stand up in Tennessee—three, in fact. The same legislature that refused to do anything on gun violence came down on them with all of their might and expelled them from the legislature. 

We have to stand up against these anti-democratic forces at work in our country, and we have to give the people their voices back. If we refuse to act while our children are dying and in a moment when no one is safe, then shame on us. Shame on us if we allow this to happen, and we do absolutely nothing. 

Saint Augustine, the African bishop of the early church, said that hope has two beautiful daughters. He said they are both beautiful, Anger and Courage--anger with the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain as they are. 

I am pleading; I am begging all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to remember the covenant that we have with one another as an American people. Stand up in this defining moment, and let’s do everything we can to protect all of us and, certainly, all of our children. We owe it to the people who have sent us here. 

I know there are those who will look at this moment and say: Politically, do you really think we can get anything done here? They will ask if this is the time given the state of politics in our country right now.

 I respond with the words of Dr. King, who said that the time is always right to do what is right, and that time is right now.

I am an occasional writer with a blog that reaches very few people. 

What Senator Rafael Warnock spoke about yesterday was yet another mass shooting (and right now, I don't have the energy to look up my sources), but there have been more mass shootings this year than there have been days in the year so far. 

Senator Warnock is right.

We are not safe in our homes.
We are not safe in our schools.
We are not safe in our workplaces. 
We are not safe at the grocery store.
We are not safe in our houses of worship.
We are not safe at concerts. (I will add, we are not safe in movie theaters, either.)
We are not safe at banks.
We are not safe at parades. 
We are not safe in our yards.
We are not safe in medical facilities. 
(There are too many people who can add, "We are not safe from the police.")

And those who can do something  . . . do nothing. Except instruct us to "run, hide, fight" or put children through traumatizing shooting drills, or put the burden on employers to come up with a safety plan in case someone does come in armed.

Warnock is one of the two senators from my home state of Georgia. Yesterday, while he spoke in the Senate and worried about his children on lockdown, I streamed live coverage on Atlanta TV and wondered if the shooter might come here.  I thought about Brian Nichols, whose shooting rampage in 2005 killed a judge, a court reporter, a deputy, an ICE officer, and nearly killed a young widow, Ashley Smith (now Ashley Smith Robinson.) 

Warnock is a man of faith who believes in prayers. 

He also believes that "thoughts and prayers are not enough."

So do I, Senator Warnock. You say that "we pray with our legs." So where do our legs need to go?

One place is to the ballot box.  I think we've forgotten that we the people do have the power to vote out the politicians we disagree with. The problem, I think, is that we believe "everyone's representative/senator is a jerk . . .  except for mine." And so we keep pulling the lever, touching the screen, punching ballots (and hopefully not leaving hanging chads or pregnant chads) for the same candidates. And decent people who want to make a difference, who might run for office, find themselves having to play a game that requires a HAZMAT suit to protect them from all the mudslinging that goes on during a campaign. 

I live in a neighborhood where we have not had a mass shooting, but since around Thanksgiving, we've have two police-involved shootings, an overdose of a teenage boy, and a young girl murdered who may have been murdered by a cop. And while I refuse to keep these incidents from living my life, it is scary to think that yes, someone could have a gun and start shooting. I've even thought about, what would I do if I were in church and someone started shooting? Our children's minister held training for people who wanted to work in the children's ministry, and she choked up when she started talking about "what to do if an intruder comes in" . It is something we should never have to tell our children.

Yesterday, it was Atlanta's turn to be added to the list of "mass shootings for the year". 

Whose turn is it going to be today? 

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.