On Sunday evening I watched the lunar eclipse from our attic window. I was isolating up in our attic because I had Covid. Yes, I had succumbed to the virus and was hoping my husband wouldn’t. The attic was a safe space that gave me a place to read, to sleep and to watch the moon.
Slowly I watched the moon slip away, disappearing left to right. I watched in the darkness until she was completely gone. I had never seen a complete lunar eclipse and when the moon disappeared fully, I felt awe and fear. I found myself reciting part of the 23rd Psalm, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me”
I was surprised to feel both awe and fear as I stared at the place where the moon had been. Perhaps these are the same emotions ancient peoples felt as they watched the the moon fade from view. It stayed dark for several minutes and then she slowly returned blood red. The blood red moon was fitting for this deadly week. Our daughter lives in Milwaukee just blocks away from where 17 people had been shot on Friday night. Then on Saturday there was the horrible shooting in Buffalo, which was clearly racially motivated, leaving 10 people dead. And then on Sunday another racially motivated shooting in a church in Laguna Woods, California. Too many guns, too much hate, how will we ever walk through this valley of the shadow of death together?
For me prayer and the psalm are a way to start. Adrienne Rich wrote, “Poetry is the liquid voice that can drill through stone.” Psalm 23 has such power I think because it has been a poem prayer for so many people. It has been for many generations a way of drilling through the hard places, of path forward together through the grief.
Gun violence impacts us all and with God’s help we need to change the narrative of our nation knowing it will be like drilling through stone. When I was first called over 30 years ago to serve as a pastor in Duluth my husband was unable to find work here. Because of this he continued his job as a police officer for the City of Minnetonka, a suburb of Minneapolis. One evening he called to say it had been a horrible day. He had been one of the first officers to arrive on the scene of a domestic homicide. Shortly after I hung up the phone, a member of the church, Joan Peterson called. Her sister Barbara had just been murdered by her ex-husband in Minnetonka, could I come to her home. Of course, and so I went to sit, listen, and pray. Our lives were now connected in ways we never expected.
That event changed Joan’s life in ways unimaginable, but out of that tragedy she found a voice and what a voice. She has found her place in the struggle for sensible gun laws. And she found her voice in our sacred texts, “no one should hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.”– Isaiah 11:9. Many others in Duluth and around our nation have joined her in the call for gun legislation. We cannot back down.
As Rich said, poetry is the liquid that can drill through stone. Psalm 23 and the prophet Isaiah give us a way forward, reminding us again that we are connected to everyone who is braving this same storm. We must stop the violence of hate speech and easy access to assault rifles. Together guns and hate truly form a valley of death.
The light was gone for a moment as I sat looking from the attic window. But the moon eventually returned round and full of light. It was a reminder that we are not alone. Striving together we can make it through the night.
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