Today's daily lesson comes from Psalm 34 verses 13 and 14:
"Keep your tongue from evil
and your lips from speaking deceit.
Turn away from evil and do good;
seek peace and pursue it."
The times we live in are so trying and the tensions in our society threaten to pull us apart, back into tribal enclaves of race and politics.
Yeats's swords come to mind:
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity"
Last night the worst of our humanity drowned a ceremony of innocence in bloodshed. Though we know very little about the culprit or his motivations at this time, we do know his reported race and the race of those murdered mean the murders are being investigated as crimes of hate. This in turn means these murders have larger, and perhaps more challenging meaning for us all in an already challenging time.
This is a time for the best of our humanity to rise up and be counted. Greater forces of division will continue to try to pull us apart from one another; in Yeats's imagery, they will try to break apart the center.
"Seek peace and pursue it," the Good Book says, meaning peace must be sought, tirelessly, and will not be found where we are, in the safety of our own homes, or ideologies, or people. It will only be found out there, in conversation and with compassion toward those who are different from us.
The worst are already there, wreaking havoc with passionate intensity, seeking to bring disharmony, disorder, and racialized anarchy; now is the time that the best of our humanity to come out also. For it will take the best of our humanity to pull against the forces of anarchy and division and hold us together as one nation indivisible.
May the best of us rise up today to seek peace -- and pursue it.
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