What Are We Celebrating?

You have heard that it was said, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. –Jesus speaking in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:38-39

When I heard the news about bin Laden an avalanche of thoughts overwhelmed me.
The first was wow! So he really was out there huh? The second was “good gracious they went in commando style to snuff him out!? What a smart move to not just haphazardly drop bombs. It makes it easier to identify the body that way.”

After all of the tactical and strategic thoughts flashed through me, my mind became ominously quiet. And in that quiet I could feel my soul.

It was hurting.

But why? Did I feel sorry for this man? No, I did not. He did many things to earn that comeuppance. As the saying goes, the chickens come home to roost. It doesn’t matter who you are, eventually we all have to answer to our actions.

But still, I was hurting, so I prayed about it. And after a short while of prayer and reading the news it hit me. It was the celebration of his death that made me sad.

Don’t get me wrong. Of course I understand why folks were happy. His death provided a tremendous sense of closure not just for our nation but also for many others around the globe. America was not his only target. There are countless other folks, some Muslims included, who personally felt the effects of his schemes.

But there was something disheartening about celebrating another person’s death. What does that say about us? What does it say about the condition of our hearts and spirits that we can rejoice in the death of someone, even if they hurt us? To be honest, I’m not sure that it says anything more than the fact that we are human. We feel, we love, and in so loving we want, desperately, to protect those that we love.

And when someone hurts those that we love, we want them to hurt.

When I was a kid growing up in southern California there was a ton of gang activity. It seemed like every single night you could turn on the news and hear about a drive by shooting or some other random act of gang violence. Soon, this culture of revenge became popularized and celebrated by some of my favorite artists in the music that I loved, Hip Hop. Now, when I listen to those songs that so joyously rapped along with, word for word, as a kid I get that same twinge of pain in my soul that I felt when I heard of bin Laden’s death. And that pain that I feel is all wrapped up in one question:

When will we stop?

When will we stop the cycles of violence that seem to characterize our identities? Folks in the hood sported red and blue. Folks cheering at the White House were sporting red, white, and blue. One group rocked bandanas and the other rocked flags. I can’t help but to see it all as just some gangsta shit.

Maybe my vision of a world of peace is something that is impossibly naïve, but it is a world that I believe in. It takes unthinkable courage to live by Jesus’ challenge to turn the other cheek. After all, how long can we bear to turn our cheeks anyways? Do we turn them in the face of death? Gandhi did, Martin Luther King Jr. did. And so have countless others of many different faiths and backgrounds when presented with the choice between fighting back with their fists or fighting back with their hearts.

This is not a critique of Obama. I think he did an amazing job in the way that he thought out this process strategically and dare I say morally. If I were in his position I hope that I could have made those series of decisions even half as well as he did.

But for some reason I cannot shake that feeling in my soul. It hurts, not for bin Laden, but rather, for all of us.