God, Guns, & Trump

“Let mutual affection continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”- Hebrews 13: 1, 2

Persons are not known by intellect alone, nor by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who they are, and who we are. Thomas Merton

My neighbor down the street put this flag up the day after the bombing in Iran began “God, Guns, and Trump.”  It disturbed my contemplative walk down a rural road by the still snowy hills and the rivers just beginning their spring melt. Thoughts spinning in my head interrupted my peace…Not my God! What does God have to do with Guns? Trump? I wonder why they put this flag out when they know it must disturb many of their neighbors?  What, I wondered, is the message beneath the message?

The few pro-Trump signs in my small town are put up by people who seem to be living on the margins. Some live in small shacks with broken windows, rotting side planks, moss covered roofs.  Others have rusted old cars, trucks, and machines piled up around dissembling barns and forever barking dogs. I try to understand where these pro-Trump sentiments come from along with how God can be married with Guns and Trump. Are they trying to say, “We have a voice now, in power, that speaks the truth of our lives and our anger at so many who are responsible for our pain?” I would be too afraid to knock on their door to ask.

How, I wonder, do I find compassion for my “enemy”? What is my capacity for hospitality in this situation? 

Some have documented extreme trauma at the core of the MAGA base. MAGA serving as a last-ditch effort, mostly unconscious, to heal the pain of familial abuse, addiction, isolation, economic and social disenfranchisement.  MAGA providing a community of coalescing around the Gospel of Hate. In our very humanness, we all are, at one point or another, susceptible to leaders and groups who promise to provide the community and belonging we long for even if this belonging is based on hating and violence towards the “others”.   (Money or power doesn’t protect us from this tantalizing and desperate lure of belonging as the Epstein crimes are showing us.) The scapegoating at the center of many groups belonging emerging now (and in the past) is a human knee jerk response to project our woundedness onto others in an attempt (mostly unconscious) to rid ourselves of the crippling pain of our own humiliation and abandonment.

There is social isolation in this small town that might surprise those who live down the hill in town.  I was not so clearly aware of it myself before I moved up here. The internet came only a few years ago. There are very few places for social gathering (one church, a small café/store only partially open, the small senior and childcare center, a very small library) where different kinds of people, new and old to the town, have a chance to gather and get to know each other.  We have a post office but no clinics or doctors, gyms, yoga studios, craft stores, or grocery stores. A large swath of the population has lived here for many generations but with an aging population and the internet some new people are moving in. There is change, difference, but few places of community to provide integration, conversation, care. 

Perhaps I know my neighbors better than I think. Maybe, I have met their mother or uncle in the nursing home downtown where I volunteer, people who are wheelchair bound, no longer able to move well or speak because of a stroke, with little money for healthcare that might have kept the brain and body healthier in middle-age.  Perhaps my neighbors like me fear not knowing who will take care of them when they get old, ill, or frail.  

In the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, it says that “Mary stood up….and turned their hearts to the Good.”  The Magdalene Gospel is not part of the canonical (traditional) bible, but many scholars believe it was written around the time of Luke’s Gospel (120CE) by communities of disciples who followed Mary after Jesus death and held her in great esteem as a leader of the disciples and a close companion to Jesus. In this passage, the disciples are “weeping and in pain”.  The resurrected Jesus has just left them after telling them to go out in the world to teach the Good News of God’s love.  But Jesus has been crucified for his teachings.  How can they be expected to follow in these footsteps?  Fear has overtaken them; courage has left them.  

It is at that moment that Mary stands up to speak words of consolation and encouragement to them.  Who among us has not longed for this kind of counsel during our darkest hours? Her words, spoken with gravity, conviction, and compassion moves their hearts from fear to faith, from violence to peace, from wounding to healing. It is a movement in the heart of massive proportions.  How impossibly hard it can be to turn one’s own heart from hatred to love, fear to faith when we are afraid. Mary in her strength and compassion provided the disciples with a bridge from fear to faith, one that gives them courage to take the next step towards the Good.  Her words ring true because she is crossing this bridge herself, with them, one step from darkness into light. 

I don’t think there is any point in arguing with my neighbors about whether or how God, Guns, and Trump go together.  But perhaps my neighbors will find another more loving God breaking through the surface of pain through the caregivers at the nursing home, the congressional staff who help them with their vet benefits, the town volunteer firefighters and first responders who drive them to the hospital in the middle of the night.  Maybe there is a kind neighbor who brings soup after the hip replacement or when the child falls ill.  May we all be blessed by people who “stand up and turn our hearts to the Good”.  May we have the eyes to see them attending however small to our longing for community, care, and belonging, the God of tenderness breaking through. 

Yesterday, during my walk along that long hilly rural road, I noticed that the flag had been taken down.