Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that laws regulating gun ownership must not infringe on the right to have a gun, including a handgun, for self-defense. The lawsuit that led to the ruling came from a Chicago resident who shot and killed an intruder in his home, in violation of the city’s handgun ban, which dates to 1982.
Living in Chicago, I’ve been hearing a lot about this. People on the side of the handgun ban warn of dire consequences if it’s lifted; people who see this as a victory are cheering our right to protect ourselves.
Handguns are illegal in Chicago, and crime rates here are lower now than they were in the 1990s. But it’s probably not because handguns have been banned for 28 years: 26 people were shot here over the weekend, and that follows at least 50 shot the weekend before.
Bans don’t work. People who want guns will get them illegally. They are so pervasive in our society, and in urban areas like where I live, that if I wanted to, I’ll bet you I could get my hands on one through the “I know this guy who’s got this friend who’s got this cousin” method.
But would I want one? I’ve ruminated on that lately. The short answer is no.
Mostly it’s because I don’t think I need one. The likelihood of me having to defend myself against an intruder in my condo feels pretty slim. I live in one of the statistically safest areas of the city, where the crimes reported within one mile over the past 30 days amount to one garage defacement, a cemetery trespass, one simple battery and one strong-arm robbery of a store (without a weapon, I might add).
Would I feel differently if I lived in a high-crime area? Probably. But then I ask myself questions like, would I really have time to get to that gun if I needed it? Maybe, maybe not. And then would I be able to pull the trigger if actually threatened? I hope so, but I can’t know that for sure.
Here’s the thing: An armed society creates a safe society through fear and intimidation. And I don’t think that’s a model to aspire to or one to be proud of. These debates make me feel like we’ve thrown up our hands and given up on the much harder job of building healthy societies and communities. Instead of adopting a sense shared responsibility for our safety, security and well-being, we’ve decided that we’re all on our own.
And that’s not how God calls us to live.
Deb Bogaert is director for editorial resources for Women of the ELCA. She once shot a BB gun a few times at some cans at a friend’s place in the country, but that’s about as far as she wants to go.
My 7-year-old is obsessed with watching the World Cup. (My husband is too, for that matter.) In my son’s case, he can rattle off all the match statistics, what country is playing what other country today, where they are located, how big they are, and, oh yes, if “we like them.”
Of course, his reasons for liking or disliking a country are based on their soccer, not their politics. Soccer is the world’s sport. In fact, FIFA (International Association of Football Associations) put out this statistic: “The cumulative audience of the 64 matches of the 2010 FIFA World Cup is expected to be in excess of 26 billion from 240 different countries” (www.cbsnews.com). Wow.
My son knows the United States is a tiny part this huge soccer culture, and his immersion in this global sports phenomenon is a great lesson in international relations, even for a 7-year-old. Even he is not so short-sighted to think that the World Cup or even soccer in general is just about the United States. We wouldn’t even be playing soccer in America if it weren’t being played everywhere else on the globe. How exciting that we are a part of it.
We in the church must not be short-sighted either. It’s not just about our congregation–it is about being a part of a larger church that does ministry all over our communities, country and world. This is a rough time for the ELCA. Between the recession and the actions of the 2009 Churchwide Assembly, it’s easy to focus narrowly, just on ourselves. But our faith isn’t just about us. Why wouldn’t we want to be a part of this global movement?
Emily Hansen is director for stewardship and development for Women of the ELCA. She’s been adapting to her family’s World Cup obsession and the racket from all those vuvuzelas that goes with it.
Three people I know died last week. They weren’t family or even close friends, but three people whom I knew nonetheless.
Myrna was 93. She and her husband celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary a couple months ago. I can’t fathom being married 70 years, or even being 93. Myrna died from … well … being old. She was living about as well as one does as a nonagenarian, and to hear that she had died was no surprise.
Rodney was 68. Not old by today’s standards, but he had been battling kidney disease for many years and took a turn for the worse some months ago. His death was upsetting, but given the circumstances, not a surprise.
Ed was 40. A few days ago he got out of bed just like any other morning and went to take a shower. Far as he or anyone else knew, he was perfectly healthy. His family found him later that morning, dead, on the bathroom floor.
That was a surprise.
Ed was my age—only 24 days older than me, to be exact. And his sudden death has me thinking a lot again about balance, about finding the sweet spot between planning for the future and living a full and happy life right now, today and every day.
See, Ed delayed plenty of gratification and passed up on a lot of things so that he could meet the goal he had set his eye on, retiring at 50. Outwardly, he seemed content enough, but I always wondered if he felt like he was missing out on things.
My dad died suddenly at 64, six months before he was set to retire. He spent the last 10 years of his life in a job he hated, but he stayed in it because the money was pretty good and he had his goal in sight.
I could live to be 93, like Myrna. So I definitely need to have a plan for the future (and probably hope that Social Security and Medicare never run out of money—not real confident about that).
On the other hand, I could drop dead next week. If that’s the case, I’m glad I went to Hawaii last month and that I haven’t been working at a job I hate for 10 years.
Neither extreme on the spectrum from “think only about today” to “store everything up for the future” is healthy. But the vast expanse in between feels pretty gray, doesn’t it?
Have you found your sweet spot on the spectrum?
Deb Bogaert, director for editorial resources, is listening attentively to both her financial advisor and the voice in her head saying, “Maui was nice, but I hear Kauai is awesome too.”
I was reminded recently of how difficult grief is at a synodical convention where two women spoke to me about death.
Lillian had lost her husband two years ago the 18th of June. She struggles with living alone for the first time in her life. She shared with me her pain and frustration, and that there are those who think she should be “over” her grieving process by now. She told me she no longer knows who she is and now goes by Lily. As I stood holding her pain with her for those sacred moments, I thought of my own husband of 32 years alive back home and I wondered, what had I to offer, really? I had an ear and I had a heart.
As I l entered her struggle, I shared Lillian’s resentment for how neatly grief has been packaged in American culture. It has been made into a process with seven stages presumed to be linear, though they often are not, and people are more or less expected to show all those stages in order and follow them. But almost two years later, Lillian wants to wail for losing her husband—she wants to wail loudly until exhaustion, and Lillian has never wailed in her life!
As I held Lillian and shared her suffering, I said a prayer for God’s grace to intervene. She asked me to write something to help her and the other women who have had their lives turned upside down and inside out by the death of a loved one. I told Lily that I would blog about her, and this is that blog.
But my encounter with death did not end with Lillian. Within the hour, my new friend Arlene, my driver for the weekend, shared how she still missed Sarah. She was 31 years old when she died suddenly in the Minneapolis airport some years ago and came up when Arlene shared with me how she knew a pastor at the convention; they both had known and loved Sarah. Arlene told me that Sarah died in the spring and her father passed in the fall that same year. She had struggled so fiercely with losing Sarah that she had been unable to grieve for her father until two years after his death.
Some of you know that sacred spaces and spiritual healing is central to my ministry. As Arlene told me about Sarah, I prayed: Okay, Lord, there are no coincidences, so just what am I to do? This blog is a beginning.
I am humbled by God’s grace and I live a life of gratitude, but I hold with wonder these encounters with death.
I know for certain that both life and death find their way and we ride either or both depending on our season.
Inez Torres Davis is director for justice, Women of the ELCA.
My blog post was almost late today. I had intended to finish it last evening, but then I got caught up with Dempsey Killebrew and the fixer upper that’s occupying all her time. The house is a grand old Southern Belle, but it’s seen some wear and tear and needs more than what some realtors would call “a hug.” It was bedtime before I finished with Dempsey.
Driving into the office this morning it hit me: I hadn’t finished the blog post! What to do? Hmm, I thought, I’ll write about Dempsey. Well, not Dempsey per se but about books. Dempsey Killebrew is the lead character in Mary Kay Andrews’s book The Fixer Upper, and it’s been a great entry on my summer reading list.
When I say summer reading list, I’m not talking about the kind of list that my cousin’s daughter has for honors English. That list is filled with books in the “well educated people read these books” category. I’m talking about a list of books that are perfect under a shade tree in the backyard or at the beach, lake or recreation spot of your choice along with the summertime beverage of your choice.
You could form your own summer reading list. That’s what I’ve done. I went “shopping” on my bookshelves and found several books that fit the bill: light-hearted or just plain funny, or at a minimum, not emotionally heavy.
Your unit could agree to a summer reading list, or you and a group of friends could do the same.
Let’s say you have eight women. Each of you could select one book for the group to read: eight books, eight weeks in July and August. You could gather at a coffee shop, in someone’s backyard, at church, or even a local park to talk about the books. If that seems way too ambitious for summer, kick back and read on your own.
Need some suggestions for your summer reading list? Many magazines publish summer reading lists about now; in fact, I think that’s how I found The Fixer Upper. National Public Radio has a whole series devoted to summer reading that even includes 10 top summer cookbooks. To quote the Barefoot Contessa, how great is that?!
Now I’m wondering, what’s on your summer reading list? I still have a couple of openings on mine.
Linda Post Bushkofsky, executive director of Women of the ELCA, learned to love books at the Monroe County Public Library in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, and started building her own collection at the AAUW book fairs each summer.
We’re seven weeks into the BP oil disaster in the Gulf, and every day now we’re seeing images of oil-covered birds struggling to survive or being rescued and cleaned up.
Some argue that the effort to clean the birds is wasted effort and wasted money, and all it’s doing is making us feel good about ourselves. Others argue that the survival rate, at least for certain species, is really very good.
It looks to me like we could argue for hours (and plenty already are) whether it’s “worth it”—if you frame worth in terms of money, time, and success rates—to try to save these animals. But what got me thinking more about this as a person of faith was this quote from the Yahoo! News story linked above:
“Dan Anderson, a professor emeritus of conservation biology at the University of California at Davis … said last week he still questions how well the rescue missions succeed but doesn’t oppose them. ‘If nothing else, we’re morally obligated to save birds that seem to be savable,’ Anderson said.”
Morally obligated … now there’s a different angle on the debate.
What is our moral obligation to try to save the birds we can? If we are truly stewards of God’s creation, should more go into the decision about whether to save individual birds than a cost/benefit analysis?
I think there’s room for all of it—big-picture strategies and actions as well as spending a few hours saving one pelican.
What do you think?
Deb Bogaert is director for editorial resources, Women of the ELCA.
Women’s organizations, as we know them today, started forming in the mid-1800s. (For an interesting overview of how they all began, visit here.) As circumstances and roles have changed in both church and society, women’s organizations have often tried to keep up with the changes and reinvent themselves.
Nonetheless, some of you probably know a unit of Women of the ELCA in a congregation today that hasn’t changed much since the 1950s or 1960s. Their activities – probably focusing on Bible study, quilt making and serving funeral luncheons – are the same today as they have been for 50 or 60 years. Most of the women in that group are easily 65 or more years old.
Would you be surprised to know of a Women of the ELCA unit with an active Facebook page and an online book discussion blog? Would you be surprised to know of a unit that regularly gathers women from their teens to their 90s around fiber arts projects, knitting and crocheting items that are given to those in need?
Would you be surprised to know of a unit that meets for monthly Bible study in a local coffeehouse? Or another unit that holds its regular study sessions over cocktails?
These are current examples of Lutheran women gathering together for study, service and fellowship.
At last year’s ELCA Youth Gathering, teenaged women told us of their desire to connect more fully with other women in the church. Kayla said: “When I surround myself with positive, good women, such as my mom, they show me what I can accomplish.” Kate said: “The older women serving Christ in my life are my biggest role models. They inspire me to live every day for God’s glory. Without the relationships I have with other women of God, my life would be very different.” Genny said: “I am especially blessed by the example of some of the older women in my church … they have been a testament and witness to devotion and service. Thanks to them!”
Yes, the face of today’s women’s organization is changing. Yet at its core, it serves the same purpose as the groups in the 1800s: providing a space for Lutheran women to come together for study, service and fellowship.
The governance structure of Women of the ELCA provides great flexibility that can meet the needs of women in any congregation. A single unit of Women of the ELCA could include a quilting group consisting mostly of women in their 70s and 80s, a book discussion group of women of all ages, and a Café group of women in their 20s and 30s.
The world as we know it is changing. Need proof? Check out this video about social media and how we communicate:
Even in the midst of change – perhaps even because of the change that is swirling about us – we Lutheran women want and need to come together for study, service and fellowship. Women of the ELCA can provide the space to make it happen.
Linda Post Bushkofsky is the executive director of Women of the ELCA.
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