Two days after the massacre of children in Uvalde, Texas, and 12 days after the mass racist assassination in Buffalo, Chenxing Han, a chaplain and teacher, told a Buddhist parable.
A man receives a poisoned arrow, Ms. Han said as she led a group of high school students to a Thai temple in Massachusetts.
The arrow that pierces his flesh, the man asks for answers. What kind of arrow is it? Who fired the arrow? What kind of poison is it? Which feathers are in the arrow, those of a peacock or a hawk?
But all these questions do not make sense, says the Buddha to his disciple. The important thing is to take out that poisonous arrow and heal the wound.
“We have to move because of the pain of all those who suffer. But it is important that it does not paralyze us, “said Ms. Han.” It makes us value life because we understand that life is very precious, life is very short, it can be extinguished in an instant. “
The last few days have revealed an arrow housed in the heart of America. He was exposed in the massacre of 19 primary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, and when a gunman imbued with white supremacist ideology killed 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket. The United States is a nation that has learned to live with mass shooting after mass shooting.
And there are other arrows that have been incorporated into everyday life. More than a million people have died from Covid, a figure that was previously unimaginable. The virus is now the third leading cause of death, even with the availability of vaccines in one of the most medically advanced countries in the world. An increase in drug deaths, combined with Covid, has reduced global life expectancy in America to a degree not seen since World War II. Police killings of unarmed black men continue with long-standing reform votes.
The mountain of calamities, and the paralysis on how to overcome it, point to a nation struggling with some fundamental issues: our tolerance as a country has grown in the face of this horror, clearing the dust after an event before it passes to the next? What value do we place on a single human life?
Isn’t the toll too high?
After Uvalde, many Americans are going deep to look for answers. Rabbi Mychal B. Springer, the manager of clinical pastoral education at Presbyterian Hospital in New York, has found himself returning to an ancient Jewish scripture in the Mishnah, which says that when God began to create, God created one person.
“The teaching is that every person is so valuable that the whole world is contained in that person, and we must honor that person completely and utterly,” he said. “If one person dies, the whole world dies, and if one person is saved, then the whole world is saved.”
We can only value life if we are willing to truly suffer, to truly face the reality of suffering, he said. He quoted a scripture of lament, the opening line of Psalm 13: “How long, Lord?”
“It’s not that we don’t care. We’ve reached the limit of how much we can cry and hurt,” he said. “It simply came to our notice then. We have to value every life as a whole world and be willing to cry because it means that this whole world is lost. “
However, instead of mourning together and taking collective action, now every crisis seems to send the country more into division and struggle for what to do in response.
Human brains suffer the death of a loved one differently from the deaths of strangers, and in crisis, grief is not our only feeling, said Mary-Frances O’Connor, an associate professor of clinical psychology. and psychiatry at the University. of Arizona, which studies the relationship between the brain and grief.
“You can’t underestimate the need for belonging,” he said. When something terrible happens, people want to connect with their “group,” he said, where they feel they belong, which can push people further into partisan camps.
In recent decades, Americans have been living in a time of declining membership, as trust in religious organizations, community groups, and institutions in general is waning. Valuing life and working for healing means stepping out of yourself and your own group, he said.
“This will require collective action,” he said. “And part of the problem is we’re very divided now.”
The question of the beauty of life arises in some of the most intense debates in the country, such as abortion. Millions of Americans believe that the annulment of Roe v. Wade would raise the value of life. Others believe it would rule out the value of women’s lives.
American culture often values individual freedom over collective needs. But ultimately, humans are born to care about others and not to walk away, said the Rev. Dra. Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal priest and professor of mystical theology. He reflected on the endless crisis as the clouds took over the spring day in Maine.
“Humans are born with meaning,” he said. “We have very, very big souls. We are born for generosity, we are born for compassion. “
What is impeded in a proper assessment of life, he said, is “our very, very disordered relationship with death.”
In the United States, the denial of death has reached an extreme form, he said, where many focus on themselves to avoid the fear of death.
This fear cuts across “all the steaks of consciousness, the common good, and the ability to act together,” he said, “because we have ultimately become animals saving our own skin, the way we seem to save the our own skin is repression and dissociation. ”
The United States is atypical in the level of armed violence it tolerates. The pace and severity of the mass shootings are not parallel to the world outside the conflict zones.
America has “a love story with violence,” Phillis Isabella Sheppard said. He directs the James Lawson Institute for Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements at Vanderbilt University, named after the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., the civil rights leader who was expelled from the university in 1960. for his role at the lunch table. ins.
Violence is almost a normal part of life in the United States, he said, and valuing life requires constantly asking how I am committed to nonviolence today? It also means giving up some things, he said, many people consider themselves nonviolent but consume violence in entertainment.
“The question that should scare us is: What will it take to make us collectively bring about this change?” she said.
“Maybe that’s the job of our lives,” he said. “Maybe this is our job as humans.”
When Tracy K. Smith, the former award-winning poet of the United States, first learned of the Buffalo and Uvalde shootings, her immediate reaction was anger and rage against “these monstrous people.” It’s easy to sink into that feeling, he said, and we are even encouraged to think it’s “wild outliers”.
“But when I brake I realize that there is something alive in our culture that has harmed these people,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s hurting us all. We’re all vulnerable to it. It exerts some kind of influence on us, no matter who we are.”
At graduating from Harvard University on Thursday, he read a poem. It was a reflection on history, the violence we live with and what age requires, he said. In his version of the poem he thought of his children, he said, but it was also a wish for his students. Many had tried so hard in recent years to be sick, to care for relatives.
“I want you to survive,” he said. “I want your bodies to be inviolable. I want the earth to be inviolable.”
“It’s a wish or a prayer.”