In times of anguish, the words seems to somehow, at the very least, coat the void with a veneer of hope. "How long, O God, how long?"
These words we offer as a prayer of desolate torment. Our world and our lives as we know them have been laid bare and scorched raw in the events that have brought us to this day.
The atrocities and heinous acts within our human family . . . within your people, O God . . . have brought us as a world to a place we have never known before.
The brutality of violence that erupts and continues in the expanse of years, should seem surreal and ethereal. But that is lost. Lost unto the sum total and depth of loss.
We are a warring people. We are at war with those who are different than us . . . with those who we make an enemy . . . with ourselves. Peace seems like a far off carrot that the mule has stopped following lifetimes ago. It is so much easier to fight than to find a peaceful means in conflict. The life and welfare of others is so easily discounted when we perceive a potential or real threat. And, far too often, the threat of harm is beyond our interpersonal relationships, but global systems of abusive power and soul depleting greed.
We are a self-serving people. Meeting our own needs has become the purpose and pursuit of our days. In privilege, if we want it, we take it. In oppression, if someone wants it, they take it from us without as much as a thought of what we will do without. Corporations buy low, sell high. People become invisible and robbed of their humanity. Respect and dignity have succumb to GNP and national debt, a defining strata of developed and developing nations, first-world, second-world, third-world countries—what have we become as a people created equal whose value is in their Creator and their being created in the Creator's Image?
Our religion has become an instrument for the assault and abuse of the very people its calls people to love. Human expressions of reality provide a dogma that instead of freeing people to love and care and be in service to one another, divides . . . separates . . . excludes . . . and condemns. The makers of dogma rape persons of their innocence and kill their ability to be heard and find justice in a community that claims peace and justice to be at the heart of its existence.
Our politics have been so removed from the politics of Jesus . . . "you are to love one another, even as you have been loved by God" . . . to a means of a prosperity dream that is rigged by the wealthy, for the wealthy, at the expense of the poorest of poor. And, the poor have been kept in poverty not by their choice or ability to make a difference, but by systems that exclude them from healthcare, education, having a voice that is heard, having a community that represents them fairly in equality and an equity of access to the resources controlled by a select few. When the top 2% of the wealthy control more than the combined 98% of the "others", something has not just gone wrong. Something has been going wrong and made wrong is ways that are so complex and complicated that the majority of the 98% have no way or means to right the system.
