Baltimore

" Jesus said to His disciples, 'I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. . . Remain in me as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on it own, unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. . . without me, you can do nothing." -[John 15: 1-8].


The world is watching the riots, and their aftermath, unfold in Baltimore. The world wants to know : "What is going on?"

The last time that Baltimore erupted in riots so severe was between April 6, and April 14, 1968, in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Many of the buildings destroyed in 1968 have yet to be rebuilt. . . .

Riots have been no stranger to America-- in 1965, riots spread through the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles for about a week. History shows that the Watts riots occurred mainly because of police brutality and unemployment. Sadly, these familiar issues are still raging strong in too many of our inner cities.

In Detroit, there are an estimated 78,000 abandoned buildings. These include not only homes and factories, but skyscrapers and a 100 year old railroad station.  There is even an Urban Decay Tour, for those fascinated by the death of one of America's most incomparable cities.

In Chicago, in 2012, more were killed from gang violence than U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.

A chilling piece in the NY Times, April 21, 2015, declared that in America, there are 1.5 million black men missing. They are either in jail, or dead.

You may ask how the death of one man, Freddie Gray, while in police custody in Baltimore, could possibly have set off such a firestorm?

In part, the answer lies in the human brain. In the human brain, there resides a Loss Center, designed to hold all of our losses, big and small. That explains why, after all of the memories of my past trauma came back to me, like a massive data dump, even misplacing my pen or my keys seemed like the end of the world. Any loss, no matter how tiny, explodes into a fireball, because the misplacement of a small pen triggers a reliving of ALL losses.

And, as we know, Loss is grief. And grief can be expressed as Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression (anger turned inward), Resignation, and Acceptance (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross). Sometimes, we get stuck - In depression, in anger. Riots are a globalized expression of Anger.

With urban communities, we often see a layering on of traumas and losses. One could imagine that a person could barely get through one cycle of grief, before another trauma occurred.

In my own experience, when the traumas came flooding back, I could not stop the storm. What I "saw" before my eyes was a scene, as if out of a tornado:  a house destroyed, china smashed, papers strewn, wooden beams splintered, glass shattered, the roof shingles 100 feet away. I was left to pick through the rubble, and try to determine what was left of value and what I would have to let go of?

In many ways, the riots are a re-enactment of that scene. With black men, who are disenfranchised, disaffected, belonging to nothing and to no one, they have nothing left to lose. And so,  they destroy everything in plain sight, in front of the whole world.

In many ways, we are still fighting the Civil War in America. I had a friend in graduate school who was pulled over by police for no reason except that she was "driving black".  When they discovered that her driver's license was expired because she had not been home in 5 months, they handcuffed her and arrested her. Why- because she is black. A white woman would have gotten a warning or a fine.We can pass all the laws that we want against discrimination and brutality, but we cannot legislate attitudes.

When you realize that you have lost everything-- like I had, like these black men in America-- you face some stark choices. In my mind, you either IMPLODE, destroying yourself through substance abuse, suicide, etc.; you EXPLODE, destroying the world around you. OR you find GOD.

But, where is our God in a world like this? ? ? --- It is in all of US.

If Jesus is the vine and we are the branches, then we are ALL connected.  The men raging in our inner cities, destroying everything including themselves? --they have become disengaged from the vine. They are rootless and abandoned.

It helps no one to say to them, "Get off the streets, get a job." We would not say that to a traumatized military veteran, so why do we say that to the men who have been through their own kind of Hell, on the city streets?

Martin Luther King knew that if one of us suffers, we all suffer. - [1 Corinthians 12]. He said, "We may have come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now." He also said, "The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict."

Ours is not to judge. But to Love.

[Related Postings: "The Need For Martin Luther King",  Jan. 6, 2013].

(c) Spiritual Devotional 2015. All Rights Reserved.