Prayers are not enough to end this
Standing directly on the whitewashed blood of Amon Beckles — Toronto’s latest gun murder victim, cut down during a funeral on Friday, at a church — pastor after pastor yesterday drove home this message, punctuated with “ Amen” and “ Yes sir.”
“ Enough is enough. I’m sick and tired of burying our children. It stops here.” As if saying it makes it so. The faith leaders are among the most persuasive practitioners in this city. They routinely call men and women to abandon lives of sin and despair for a future of heavenly happiness. But their message of redemption has been muted, eclipsed by gunfire that strikes wayward young boys even as their mothers and grandmothers pray in holy reverence.
Representing large and small churches, independent ministries and mainline denominations, the ministers at yesterday’s rally share one thing in common: they have buried far too many young black men and they know their church could easily have been the one shot up. So they came yesterday as a sign of solidarity with Pastor Andrew King and the Toronto West Seventh-day Adventist Church, site of the latest tragedy — one that has outraged the city.
“ This is not the wild, wild west or some setting for a TV movie. This is our Toronto,” provincial Opposition Leader John Tory told the close to 100 people at the rally in Rexdale. The ministers cajoled, cried to the heavens, invoked divine intervention, criticized slow government action as well as their own, and displayed what is now the city’s stock array of emotions — shock, anger, disgust and resolve — marked by befuddlement and bewilderment.
“ It’s beyond words what’s been happening to our city,” said Rev. Al Bowen, pastor of the Abundant Life Tabernacle, where Beckles’ parents worship.
“ Kids will keep dying until we break the code of silence and start to speak up . . . Our kids have taken the wall of silence and they’ve turned it into a virtue where it becomes the roadway to the graveyard,” he said. Maybe the brazen shock of the latest shooting will create a turning point, said Supt. Ron Taverner. Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Maybe — because of the sense of violation, the sinking to a new low, the fear that once these kids cross that line of shooting up a funeral and a church they would
do anything to anyone in any community at any function — maybe that will fuel a sustained response. But history suggests not. The media will move on to the next tragedy. Individuals move on with their lives. And those unfortunate citizens trapped in the killing fields tremble and cower and soldier on as best they can. The shootings have been a supposed concern for years. Already, a generation of mothers are weary from holding vigils and news conferences, pleading for an end to the killings. Media rarely respond to such rallies any more. And some do, only to ridicule. Only a few congregations have seen it as their mission to respond to the despair and community breakdown that has spawned the violence. Most of the ministers present yesterday belong to evangelical, conservative or fundamental faiths that often focus more on the soul than the body, heaven rather than the hell of the ghetto, the hereafter as opposed to the here and now. They are law and order types who support strong discipline, more police on the streets, quick and stern justice. Prayer is the weapon of choice. But increasingly they are burying kids they only recently baptized, their own church kids and those who never set foot in a pew. The lessons of the streets too often displace those taught in Sunday School. And it’s becoming clear that heavenly intervention may just start with earthly action. Social action.
“ Pastors, we can’t just sit here and pontificate,” Bowen said. “ We have to get out to the community, get out of our offices. Take our people and get out to the community where these kids are . . .” Then summing up the disconnect that has separated the church from the disaffected and now deviant elements of the community, Bowen said: “ Police are actually closer to the community, many times, than we are. We have to stop our pontificating and get out there.”
Churches, mosques and synagogues have been as delinquent as everyone else in watching the city slide into ruin without responding with a sense of urgency. Now that the “ evil” of violence has been brought to the doorstep of the church, mixing the sacred and the profane, a joint church-state-community response may be possible.
Though, saying it doesn’t make it so. Royson James usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca