The Unspoken Mental Health Crisis

(This post is scheduled to appear in the Lebanon Enterprise on Wednesday April, 5th. Special permission has been granted to publish it here, as well.)

I remember being filled with a sense of foreboding dread that was only going to be diminished when I got my child back in my arms and could give him a hug and kiss. It was December 14, 2012 and my five year-old was a kindergartner in our town’s one elementary school. Of course the news had spent a large part of the school day trickling in. Some unknown number of children my child’s age shot and killed in a school not unlike the one my child was attending a little over two hours away. Even as my wife and I finally got to him and took him back to the safety of our house, the devastating news that was coming out of Newtown, CT was more horrific than anyone could possibly imagine. “Surely,” many of us had to have said that day, “this is the worst it can get. They have to do something about the rampant gun violence infecting our schools and nation. There are 5 year-old kids shot dead in one of the safest communities in the nation.” Of course, we know now that that kind of deliberate and determinative action would never come. No more than it did following Columbine, or Blacksburg (where my pregnant wife and I had been the morning of that shooting), or Aurora, or Umpqua, or Las Vegas, or Orlando, or any of the other 100 or so places that have had their sense of safety and security obliterated. No more than it will come following this week’s events in Nashville after which a Tennessee Congressman would quickly declare that there was nothing that could be done legislatively about gun violence in this country. Though, he did offer his thoughts and prayers for the families over the victims and the community as a whole. I’m sure that made folks involved feel much better.

The reality is that on that Friday in 2012, a week and a half before we, in the Christian tradition, would celebrate the birth of the one that we declare to be the Prince of Peace, any semblance of peace of mind that any parent of school-age children in the country had was shattered, never to exist again. Each day I (and every single parent who drop off their children at school, the bus stop, or the train station) say “goodbye,” “have a good day at school,” “work hard,” and “I love you” to our young ones we do so 100% of the time knowing that could be the last thing we ever say to them depending on if their numbers come up as winners in the most macabre lottery in the history of the known universe. This has been the case for ten and a half years and those feelings have only ever been affirmed with every new city whose name gets added onto the list while nothing has ever been done to ease them. By now every parent in the nation knows that there really is no characteristic of community that exempts them from the possibility that someone might walk into the door of their children’s school and begin to squeeze the trigger of an AR-15 hoping to kill as many kids as possible in whatever time they have before they themselves are killed. This tragedy has repeated itself in wealthy communities and impoverished areas. It has happened in majority white spaces and those occupied by persons designated as non-white. It has occurred in big cities, suburbs, and in rural areas of our country. It has taken place in public and parochial schools where, presumably, kids were already surrounded by thoughts and prayers. And the only way that any parents can find respite from this horror is by deluding ourselves into believing that some quality or another renders such actions impossible at our kids’ schools. We also know that we are only ever lying to ourselves. Moreover, for all the lip service that we give to wanting there to be more mental health services available to persons who need it in order to prevent the next shooting (even as those same services are the first to be cut from budgets when tightening is required), we never talk about the complete and utter hell that every parent, grandparent, uncle, aunt, brother, sister, sibling is trapped in everyday our children leave our sight as they go to be educated and the wounds are freshly ripped open with every new report of a mass shooting at a place of primary education.

At my church, United Presbyterian, we are mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, siblings of school children and we are sick and tired of this being our normal existence. We take seriously our call to follow the Prince of Peace and to work to spread that peace wherever we go in the world. We denounce any governing body that believes that there is nothing that can be done to insure that the next child to die for the cause of unfettered gun ownership in this country is the last. Moreover, we believe it is the calling of all people to work together to bring this uniquely American scourge to a conclusion and we will continue to do all we can to proclaim the call of Jesus to never live by the sword (or gun) lest we, or others we love, die by the sword (or gun). If, in this time of mental health crisis, you need a place where this message is unambiguously proclaimed from our worship space or, if you just need somewhere to be a port in the storm, we invite all who wish to join us to come on Sunday mornings at 11:00. We’ll save you a pew!

Image: Nicole Hester/The Tennessean via AP