‘How long, oh Lord, how long?’
Fear and violence at the heart of mass shooting and horrible conditions at border detention facility in El Paso
I was among the 500 or so faith leaders from around the country who, on the last Sunday of July, gathered in a Texas city that had already been confronting despair and pain but within days would be overcome with grief and anger.
We were in El Paso on July 29 to take part in Moral Mondays at the Borderlands with Rev. William Barber. We were invited by the Border Network for Human Rights, a grassroots advocacy group that has been working in the borderlands for more than 20 years. I spent my time in El Paso crying, singing and shouting. In the days since returning to Houston, I have been seeking words for my tears. I have the words for the songs and the words for the shouting, but the tears are harder to collect into nouns and verbs.
Driving down the interstate from the airport to the church for Sunday night’s mass meeting, El Paso stretched out on one side and Juarez on the other. Land on one side now called Texas that was once called Mexico, land on the other side that remains Mexico, both called good on that third day of creation.
The blazing sun felt alarmingly close. Through squinting eyes, I took in the beautiful mountains and the brown earth of dessert. I thought of people traveling in the heat, of the desperation it would take to walk miles and miles. Of the exhaustion and the hope for safety.
I found a seat in the sanctuary preparing for the mass meeting. I saw Rabbi Oren Hayon of Congregation Emanu El and Rev. Duane Larson of Christ the King Lutheran: two familiar faces in a sea of liturgical garb and street clothes. On the wall, to the right of the pulpit, hung dried chili peppers. The meeting began with a prayer. The refrain of this prayer was,
long, oh Lord, how long?” How long will children be separated from their parents; how long will people be kept in bonechilling conditions, sleeping on the concrete; how long, oh Lord, will people be denied basic human decency and dignity, not given a toothbrush; how long will we permit the government to force people to drink from toilets; how long?
The meeting continued: a two-hour worship service with sermons from imams and rabbis and reverends. These sermons were punctuated by testimonies. Most of the testimonies were offered in Spanish. My high school Spanish provided a haunting shorthand before the translation. I could understand words like hungry, frozen, pain. I didn’t need a translator to comprehend the tears of the mother trying to protect her son. I know, you know, that there are real people with names and families suffering — held by our government — knowing this did not prepare me to hear and see Rigoberto, Alex, Sanaada, Hermalinda and Margarita.
We heard about hunger strikes, of a 5-year-old boy inside a facility who tried to hang himself with his own shoelaces, of children as young as 4 cutting themselves. Despair and desperation — not somewhere else but here — not done by someone else but done in our name. People given frozen food they cannot heat, sleeping on concrete, not given any way to clean themselves; separated from their children, from their parents.
Rev. Barber talked about his two dogs; how he gives them special bones to keep their teeth healthy, how he keeps them clean and brushed, how he makes sure they are not too hot or too cold. His dogs! Alex, in his testimony, said, “We are not animals to be treated like that.”
I found my hotel room. Gratitude that I knew where my children were and that they were safe. Gratitude that I had a bed and comfort and that no one would be coming in the night to take me or a loved one. Weeping anguish for each person denied such basic human needs. Gratitude and anguish. Anger and determination.
This was the same anguish I felt last Sunday when I learned that while we slept, the second mass shooting in less than 24 hours took more lives, this time in Dayton, Ohio. The same anguish that washed over me as news came in of the mass shooting in El Paso. Apparently the murderous rampage in El Paso was spurred on by antiimmigrant nationalism and anti-Hispanic racism. He is far from the first mass shooter to be inspired by racist ideologies.
Some of those who were slaughtered were citizens of Mexico and some were citizens of the United States. No matter where they called home, they can never return home again. Surely the language used by our leaders to describe people seeking to enter this country, and the way our government treats these children of God, holds some of the blame for these murders. We cannot imagine words to have no effect. We must add our words, words of peace, words of righteousness, words of welcome to the cacophony of xenophobia and racism. And not words alone but our actions must match our words.
Monday morning after our training we took buses to a vacant lot and from that gathering point we marched along the high fence of the detention center to the access gate. I knew the people held on the other side of the fence could not see us but could they hear us? Could they hear our cries for justice? Did they know we care?
Did they hear the horns or cars as they drove by blaring in support? Did they know they are not alone?
We asked to make a pastoral visit to the people being detained. The facility had already been closed to any visitors, a move made as soon as we began walking. And so we cried, and shouted, and sang. As Rev. Barber said, “We came to bear moral witness in freedom’s name.”
And so we did. In freedom’s name, in the names of our various faiths, we bore witness and now we must continue. “Somebody’s hurting our family, and it’s gone on far too long. And we won’t be silent anymore,” we said in a litany Sunday night. It is no less true now. Somebody’s hurting our family: hurting them in detention facilities, hurting them with assault rifles, hurting them with racist and xenophobic rhetoric that all too easily becomes violence well beyond the pain words can inflict.
The various incarnations of violence in our country are connected. The shootings and the rhetoric and the way we are treating human beings at our borders; the racism and the xenophobia; the fear and the violence — it is all connected. We cannot believe these are isolated phenomena.
Outside the detention facility in El Paso, Barber said, “You’re holding angels in this place. But you will not hold them forever. We join them now, and not only do we bring condemnation, but we bring hope. It doesn’t have to be this way. America, turn around. America, repent. America, stop. America, change your ways.” Do you know the story he was referencing? It is a story shared by Jews, Muslims and Christians.
In the story, Abraham is resting at the entrance of his tent when three strangers appear nearby. He welcomes them, honors them and rushes off for water to wash their feet. He has food prepared. He provides for the strangers. Abraham and Sarah welcome the strangers into their home. They offer them water and bread and food.
Abraham, the religious ancestor of Jews, Muslims and Christians, offers hospitality to strangers. And then the strangers are suddenly revealed to be messengers of God. The face of the stranger becomes the face of God.
We know xenophobia was behind the mass shooting last Saturday in El Paso. We know that racist and nationalist ideals inspired that man who had access to an assault-style rifle. I have heard and you have heard that the cause of mass shootings is the shooter: mental health, a lack of a father, video games, no prayer in school, divorce, atheism, alcohol and drug addiction. The problem with these arguments is that countries like Canada, Germany, Australia have individuals with similar life experiences and a society with similar trends. What they do not have is a mass-shooting problem. They regulate guns.
We must demand action to stop gun violence in our country. We must demand that it stop with our voices as we call our elected officials and even if we feel like it’s not doing any good we say that we will not tolerate assault rifles in the hands of civilians; that we will not tolerate the lack of background checks and waiting periods; that we are not willing to live with mass shootings as any sort of norm.
Toni Morrison died on Tuesday. I have been holding her words in the midst of the pain of the senseless violence that has become a daily occurrence. There is a sermon in the novel “Beloved” that keeps coming back to me: “In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart … Here in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard …”
There is too much work before us to begin from anything other than love. We must love and love hard. Love the stranger and the friend. Love is what will sustain us for our work to end racism, our work for gun safety, our work for our brothers and sisters being deported away from their families, our work for the Earth, our work for equality and justice for all people of every religion, of every race, of every sexual orientation.
Love is the only thing that will keep us going when we are weary and tired, when anguish for our world wakes us in the night and we despair, when hate begins to build within us. Only with love can we persist and resist, it is only through the power of love that we will not give up. And we cannot give up. We cannot give up on the dream or on the dreamers. We cannot give up on a realm of peace and justice. We cannot give up.
Rev. Laura Mayo is senior minister of Covenant Church: an Ecumenical, Liberal, Baptist Congregation in Houston.