Listen!

The first time I went to see a therapist he spent about 35 seconds listening to me introduce myself before he reflected back what he heard, “It sounds like it’s really important to you that people listen to you.”

Genius.

It brought back a flood of memories, including that time when I was working at a restaurant, trying to talk to the apps guy on the cooking line and apparently was at the end of it with being interrupted: “LISTEN!” The response somehow blazed itself into my memory: “Heh heh heh. He said, ‘Listen.'”

LISTEN!

Last night I watched as the Charlotte protests streamed in my Facebook feed. Some of my Charlotte-area community was frustrated and irritated: how does breaking the law, destroying your city, and shooting people make any sense at all as a protest of shooting and destruction?

I think there’s an answer. It is a difficult answer, but one that demands our attention—and our repentance.

The answer is that we do not listen to the whisper.

The answer is that we do not listen in the face of beauty.

The answer is that we do not listen to the voice of reason.

The answer is that we do not listen to the cry for justice.

What Flannery O’Connor said about her fiction resonates with the passion of the protest:

I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

People “riot” because we as a whole have not listened. People have to shout when we do not listen to their whispers, when we are not moved by the beauty of their dead, when reason’s voice is drowned out by the comfort of our routines, when we are deaf to the cries of the poor.

There’s something else about O’Connor’s work that calls to me as I watch the news. It’s the fact that in her stories the moments of “grotesque,” of startling violence, are moments of grace—if the people in their midst are willing to accept them.

Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.

Can we watch in hope that now, at last, we are entering a moment of grace?

Emergency

In response to the riots the Governor of North Carolina has declared a state of emergency.

In a Huffington Post article that ran two days ago it was reported that 67 people have been killed by police in the U.S. since Colin Kaepernick began his protest at the end of August.

67 people in 22 days.

Why does it take a riot, with one non-fatal shooting, for someone to call a state of emergency? We are in a state of emergency with the violence meted out by the police in our country. Dozens of bodies. Scores of people whose lives are worth less, apparently, than the glass door on the front of a hotel. The safety of all of us, and the safety of African Americans in particular, is not worth pursuing with all the stops pulled, all the money freed up, all the resources diverted?

We are in a state of emergency. And still, the Powers seem incapable of listening.

Is there no one willing to turn this violence into a moment of grace?

Violence

Perhaps the reason why nobody is listening is that nobody in our country has the moral authority to call out violence as the wrong answer.

Flannery O’Connor again:

Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue.

Nobody on the political right has the moral authority to call out police shootings because the party platform is financed by the gun industry. When the reason why you get votes is because you have been bought by guns and have staked your time in office to the perpetuation of the the currently-accepted misinterpretation of the Second Amendment, you have no moral authority to call out the violence of those who kill with guns. Especially not in the line of duty. Do you feel your life is in danger? Surely you must kill.

Nobody on the political left has the moral authority to call out police shootings because the Democrats as much as the Republicans are the War Party. Barack “Drone King” Obama should probably be stripped of his Nobel Peace Prize for the perpetuation of killing around the world as the first response to threats real or imagined. The persistence of Guantanamo speaks to our national complicity in illicit policing of those perceived to be life-threatening enemies, enforcing judicial sentencing without the benefit of the judiciary.

When we look into police shootings we see our own grinning reflections. How can we but shrug?

Maybe, just maybe, the violence of the people will be the violence of new birth. Maybe, just maybe, the mayhem of a protest raging out of control can bring forth a moment of grace.

But like most grace, it will require repentance.

Are we ready to stop grinning back at ourselves?

Are we able, finally, to listen?