How did we all get here — and now what? About violence, Tribalism, & the Real Call of God’s People

When grief cuts deeply, words come slowly. There is nothing wrong with this, or with feeling deeply enough to weep. Tears that slowly come can slowly water healing… can grow us into new, redemptive ways of being.

Maybe now isn’t the time to rush forward, but rather to reflect inward: How did we all get here, how are we somehow contributing to what’s happening, who do we personally want to be right now…so we can move toward where we all really want to go?

“This is a world of all kinds of evil and violence and cultural warring, and where is there to turn?

We mark days like this — us who’ve been marked by deep grief, who are heartbroken and weary that we are still being marked by all this violating violence.

I once had dinner with the theologian Miroslav Volf and we found ourselves sharing how we both, as young children, experienced losing siblings to violent deaths, and Volf living through the violent Balkans wars — this is a world of all kinds of evil and violence and cultural warring, and where is there to turn?

It’s striking, how “violated” and “violence,” come from the very same Latin root word, meaning “force.”

Whenever our words, our judgements, our tone, our presuppositions, our actions, forcefully overstep and violate a person’s sacred self, and space, and soul — we’re the ones doing violence to each other. 

Wherever there’s a forceful overstepping, there is a violation — and that’s always a desecration. 

Violence always lies about what every person truly is: sacred and too valued to be violated. 

And I keep returning to this, sitting with this: Whenever our words, our judgements, our tone, our presuppositions, our actions, forcefully overstep and violate a person’s sacred self, and space, and soul — we’re the ones doing violence to each other. 

And violence never genuinely defends anything; violence only desecrates the very lines in another’s story, that it desperately intends to defend in its own. Try to violently defend your right to speak, your family’s way of life, your right to live as you’re so led, by violently taking away someone else’s, isn’t any kind of defense, but is furthering all kinds of desecration.   

What is always wrong is the myth of redemptive violence. 

What is always an old and ugly lie is that violence can ever right anything. 

All violence can do is cut down — cut down others,  and cut down one’s self; violence is completely incapable of creating good.  

Rather, this is our daily work of building and creating genuine good, of ceasing to hate any in our family of humanity:  

The only way to overcome evil is to cover everyone with a love that others no one.  

Miroslav Volf once wrote this, and I’m finding it deeply reorienting in these disorienting days: 

“To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one—the first when evil is perpetrated; the second when evil is returned,” is what Volf wrote. 

Refuse to retaliate, and you refuse evil from winning twice.

The only way to overcome evil is to cover everyone with a love that others no one. 

This is all personal, this is about each of us personally. 

Evil withers and dies wherever it isn’t returned.

When people refuse to return violence, revolutionary possibility returns to the people.  

And we can only hope to defuse evil’s power, if we refuse evil’s craving to be returned —  and we can only refuse evil’s craving to be returned if we refuse to remake our God into the image of our own resentments. And this we know: Ours is the God who never demonizes his enemies, but sacrificially dies for them. 

The real call is to repay evil — with real blessing.

The real call is never to return evil; the real call is always to repay evil — to “repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called” (1 Peter 3:9).

The real call is to repay evil — with real blessing: Be far kinder than the narrative they have about you, because this is the best way to prove they’ve got the story about you all wrong. Always go higher and never let your response make you resemble the very thing you oppose. 

The real call is to repay evil — with real blessing: Do whatever it takes to grow your love for the other larger than you fears: because at the root of all kinds of violence, is some kind of fear. 

The real call is to repay evil — with real blessing: Only speak words that make souls stronger.

Really.  Always. By His Spirit, by His grace alone. 

Now is the moment we need to not only believe in freedom of speech for those we disagree with, we must also believe that cruciform grace, and the unwavering, non-violent honor of the sacredness of every person, especially of those with whom we disagree, is the only way for us all to actually stay free.   

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