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¹⁷ This is what the Lord Almighty says:
“Consider now! Call for the wailing women to come;
send for the most skillful of them.
¹⁸ Let them come quickly
and wail over us
till our eyes overflow with tears
and water streams from our eyelids.
¹⁹ The sound of wailing is heard from Zion:
‘How ruined we are!
How great is our shame!
We must leave our land
because our houses are in ruins.’”
²⁰ Now, you women, hear the word of the Lord;
open your ears to the words of his mouth.
Teach your daughters how to wail;
teach one another a lament.
²¹ Death has climbed in through our windows
and has entered our fortresses;
it has removed the children from the streets
and the young men from the public squares.

Maybe we could just sit down and cry together first. In the presence of Black rage. In the presence of white shame. In the presence of grief and despair and the overwhelming knowledge that white men with guns just keep killing people. In the devastating remembrance that this is not the first time that a white man with a gun has chosen a place of worship as the most devastating possible place to exact horrific violence.

We need to say out loud that this was another act of violent white supremacy, not just a disturbed individual. It matters that we point out that, as with almost every instance of mass violence, it was a man who committed this atrocity, with a man’s sense of entitlement to assert his will at whatever cost to those around him. We need to say out loud that once again gun violence has cost innocent people their lives, that while a man bent on doing damage with a knife can certainly hurt people, guns kill people far more rapidly and efficiently than anything else.

And then we need to sit with the fact that this horrific act was committed in a church. That it wasn’t random that the killer chose the AME church that has been such a force for Black empowerment and leadership development. That it wasn’t random that violence was perpetrated in a temple of peace. That this man sat and prayed with his victims for an hour before he attacked, and God did nothing to stop him. That the only way that God will ever stop the violence—not just the brutality of mass shootings, but also the daily violence of racism in all its massive and tiny iterations—is if we are committed, individually and collectively, to being God’s voice, God’s hands, God’s pain and rage, God’s impulse toward love and justice.

There is so much to be done, so many rents in the fabric of our common life that we can only hope are possible to stitch or patch together. There is so much that each of us is called to do. But maybe first we could just sit down together for a little while and cry.

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In writing about her mother’s death, Meghan O’Rourke suggests, “A mother is a story with no beginning.” This is because a mother was always there—from that very first moment of your creation in her body. She’s a  given, a part of the fabric of your story from day one.

In my mom’s case, her story having no beginning seems especially true. She was adopted—and  never wanted to know anything about her birth parents. So her beginnings were shrouded in mystery. No one knew the story, not even her.

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It was not a surprise when my mother died. Survival rates for ovarian cancer are not high, and hers was in stage four by the time it was diagnosed. Against those odds, she lived three years with a high quality of life.

Finally, when the experimental treatments could not stave it off any longer, she refused any more chemo and radiation, quit eating, and slowly let go.

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Look! I have made this bowl
for you, this large dark blue one
with lilies etched across the bottom,
around the sides.

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