I don't know about you, but these days I'm almost hesitant to read my news feed. There's been so much tragedy, suffering, and violence. As a pastor, I've got to face the things going on
around us, because they deeply affect the people I'm responsible to teach and care for. So I have to keep looking into the darkness, and thinking about it, and talking about it.
I'm also aware that the dramatic and troubling events that seem to be cascading all around us create a form of trauma
for us, which heightens the challenge of recovery. Recent research bears this out: reading about violent news stories on social media creates symptoms in people similar to PTSD. (Read about at 2015 study on this topic here.)
So, for our spiritual well-being, and also for our emotional health and recovery from addiction, we need to talk about this.
It seems like every
time there's another horrific mass shooting, two predictable lines of discussion emerge: (1) frustration and debate about the access to guns in our culture, and (2) frustration and confusion about how someone could do something so evil. Let's leave the discussion about gun legislation to other forums, and focus on the second question. How could someone do something so horrific?
I'm going to do a remix of some writing by Karl Vaters. (By "remix" I mean that I'll use mostly his content, but add some of my own and change things a little bit.) Vaters wrote a piece in Christianity Today in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesvile this summer, but it's timely to talk about today in the aftermath of the mass shooting in Las Vegas.
Evil is not a theory.
It’s not a concept created by angry, red-face preachers trying to stop people from having a good
time.
Evil is what flies airplanes into buildings, drives an automobile into pedestrians, and shoots concert-goers with assault weapons.
But evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
No one wakes up one morning, in the middle of a fine, stable, happy life and decides, “I’m going ram my car through a crowd of people today.”
We get to places like that slowly. Piece by piece. Step by hateful step.
We Choose How We Respond To Loss
It usually begins with a loss of some type – whether real or imagined. Then, how we choose to respond to that loss, perhaps to a long series of losses, starts us on a trajectory.
We can respond with anger and hatred. That’s easy. Angry, hateful voices are all around us and they’re looking for fellow travelers.
But when we constantly expose ourselves to the voices of anger and hatred, they create a wall so high and so thick that no other voices can get in.
We get hurt, then our hearts get hard, then we find others to hate, which leads us to hurt.
Like a train pulling out of a station, that trajectory starts slowly. But once it gets going, it creates a momentum that, outside of a dramatic, powerful
intervention, is impossible to stop.
Anger builds. Hatred grows. Evil plants a seed.
Those of us who've had to deal with early life trauma -- whether that led to
struggles with addiction, or other problems later in life -- know about the destructive power of pain in the soul that lies unacknowledged and unhealed. It doesn't go away. It festers.
I've often used the analogy of food and digestion to clarify this. (It's
not "scientifically correct" but go with me on it anyway ... you'll see.) The various experiences of our lives are like food that goes into our bodies and gets (mostly) digested. If somehow food gets lodged in our intestines it would be damaging and toxic. That's what happens when we have experiences that we get "hung up" on. We can't let them go. Maybe they're so painful that we try not to even face them ... but they are still there, affecting our unconscious patterns. Often these patterns DO
arise in our consciousness, and if we nurse them, they turn into deep resentments.
We've got to process them. We've got to "digest" them somehow. If we don't, these unhealed wounds cause us to look for unhealthy outlets to cope with that pain. We turn to others in unhealthy ways, and turn to addictive substances and behaviors.
I think there's an interesting connection here: Vaters is pointing out a similar trajectory that leads to hatred and violence. He
traces the roots of evil to the process of being hurt, and letting that hurt turn to hatred. I'm sure he would agree that it's more complicated than that -- and that the level of evil required for someone to commit such horrific violence goes beyond any kind of simple formula. (Remember, he was writing these words in response to the violence in Charlottesville, not in response to Las Vegas.)
There's a lot of hurt and hate going around these days. For the vast majority of people, that hatred doesn't work its way out in acts of heinous violence ... but it is often destructive nonetheless.
But what about "righteous" anger? What about anger at injustice?
This might raise a question for you: isn't there a place for the hurt and anger we experience when we've been wronged to fuel our work for justice? Much of the work that is done to fight against abuse, oppression, and injustice is fueled by hurt and anger, is it not?
Like so many social justice activists, Ghandi's work in India was fueled by his own experience of pain and anger over discrimination he saw and experienced. When asked how he dealt with the anger he felt at receiving injustice, he said:
"I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson which is to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.”
So here we a more nuanced way of looking at how we handle hurts
and the anger they create. Ghandi didn't simply work to "get over" his anger ... he held onto it, and used the energy that this anger gave him. But notice that there was an important step he took along the way. He didn't just "simmer" in this anger ... he conserved and controlled his anger and transmuted it into energy to use for good.
This process of conserving and controlling anger (as Ghandi did) is what separates the person who's anger turns to hatred, and then violence -- from the one whose anger is transmuted into energy to change the world for good.
I'm
speculating now, but I believe this is similar to the work each of us is called to do with the hurts and anger in our own lives. It is the work of facing, refining, and controlling our anger and hurt. It is the work of deep reflection about it, rather than just letting it simmer in the background. It is the work of challenging our assumptions about what happened to us (maybe things were going on that we didn't know). It's the work of bringing new compassion and
understanding into the things that happened.
This work is part of what happens in the 4th step of AA. We look at our hurts and resentments. We don't just list them. We examine them, we think about why those things bother us so much, how specifically they damaged us. But then we go further,
and look at two crucial things:
(a) we try to honestly assess how WE might have done something to contribute to the problem. We may have been purely innocent victims, but it's also possible that we were partners and contributors in a dance of misunderstanding and conflict.
(b) we try to look again at the people who hurt us and see them as broken, flawed, and hurting people themselves. We try to see the humanity of the other people, which often changes our perceptions of what happened to us.
This kind of deep reflection about our hurts and resentments is, for many,
life-changing. I believe it's essential work for people in recovery to do ... and for most other people too.
Who knows, maybe if more people did this, there would not only be less addiction, but also less hatred and violence in the
world?
