From May 16: The Pentecost Experience

Dear People of Christ Church,


As I write, I’m sitting at Café on the Common: my second office. It’s lively, bright, and sunny, with the whole spectrum of our city sitting and drinking their coffee. Fat/thin, young/old, black/white, business-serious and summer-casual: everybody’s here. I wonder if this is what it felt like on that day of Pentecost, 2000 years ago—the disciples just hanging around, doing what they had to do, and then, boom! Tongues of fire and a riot of languages, everyone met by the Holy Spirit exactly where they were, finding them each in their own languages, but also uniting them in a common experience. This Sunday, we’ll have our own linguistic Pentecost moment, with Spanish, German, Italian, Swedish, Hebrew, and even Welsh portions of readings (all of it will also be printed, as usual, in English so you can follow along).

The Pentecost experience of unity in diversity was something we experienced last Sunday at the Mother’s Day walk for peace, too. Thousands of people had gathered in Dorchester from all around—we had our Christ Church sign, just as there were banners from Episcopal Churches in Walpole and Sudbury, Unitarians from Lexington and Chelmsford, and individuals from all over with T shirts or buttons memorializing those they had lost. The day was pervaded by a deep sense of mourning, as well as a deep sense of possibility. Terrible things have happened. But newness and grace are possible.

First, we can start asking some different questions; the usual narrative we tell around tragic violence puts the focus on the victim. We talk about how someone was “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” with the subtext that it could perhaps have happened to anyone. This is a natural response; it is, strictly speaking, true: Jorge Fuentes was walking down his own street, and had someone else been walking down that street at the same time his killer pulled out a gun, that person could have been shot instead. There was nothing about Jorge that would have made someone single him out. Yes, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it didn’t “just” happen. It’s more complicated than that.

While we think we are preserving the innocence of the dead, we’re still putting all the focus on the victim, not the perpetrator. Tina Chery, the founder of the Louis Brown Peace Institute, said on Sunday that we should instead ask: “Where did they get the gun?” These crimes are perpetrated by individuals who are, themselves, part of a wider context. There is a whole web of poverty and violence and poor education that brings them to that point. And a whole other system of criminality and commerce that brings the gun that they pick up.

The police have not arrested the person who killed Jorge, but what about the other 6,000 youth nationwide who have been killed by gun violence since he was in September? That’s 12,000 parents whose children have died. What about those guns? What about those communities where 1% of the population terrorize the rest? What if there were the same level of outcry whenever any person, anywhere, were killed? What if, as a culture, we really and truly valued the life of every person? What would have to change? How would each of us have to change?

I don’t have all the answers—not even close. There was something so holy, though, about all of us pouring through the streets of Dorchester, just for a morning, to stand with Tina, and Jorge’s mom, and Scarlett, whose six year old son was killed in Newtown, CT who also walked that day. As Rev. Tim Crellin, priest at St Stephen’s, Boston, said, “These are the first of many steps.”

Last night, at our Alewife Deanery meeting, we talked about how to move forward in this work for peace in our cities. All of our contexts are different; Waltham and Burlington won’t need the same thing, and neither will Bedford and Cambridge. Below, you’ll see an announcement about a community meeting that’s happening in Newton that our own Heather Leonardo heatherleonardo@gmail.com plans to attend. So please be in touch with her if you want to be part of that. Finally, mark your calendars for September 28, when the annual diocesan resource day will host workshops on nonviolence organizing. And feel free to give money--we’ve so far raised $200 for the Louis D Brown institute, and will collect donations for one more Sunday; write B Peace on your check.

And pray! This Sunday the disciples were gathered in one place praying, when they were surprised by the Spirit. It can happen to us, too.

Peace,
Sara+