Worship and Power

Love conquers hate. Prayer is powerful. Everyone is welcome here. We are all siblings. Be kind to everyone. Treat one another as you yourself want to be treated. For each and every person, new life arises out of the darkest, most dreadful days. Everyone is a beloved child of God.

These are scary words to someone who has latched onto guns as a source of power. To someone who believes that violence is the answer. To someone who fuels their actions and beliefs with hatred. To someone addicted to the power that comes with position or privilege.

Houses of worship have been targets of shooters and haters for decades. Physical structures built by faith are being fouled with hateful graffiti and burned by arsonists. Worshipers are being assaulted by white supremacists armed to the teeth. The past four years of social media filled with white nationalist political rhetoric have coincided with an increasing frequency and deadliness to these attacks.

The shooting begins during service, as greeters at the door welcome the stranger, as people are praying at the temple or singing in the choir, while the table is being set for communion or Shabbat. Shooters violate the sacredness of worship while killing people where they are vulnerable in large numbers.

In world religions, each and every one, there is no room for hatred and scorn of others. Those who engage in worship, therefore, are a threat to prejudice, misogyny and bigotry. Just as darkness is always defeated by light, living a life of loving kindness wipes away the distances between us, illuminating our essential kinship. Love of others makes way for the recognition that every single person in the world is as beloved as you are.

Even the ones who are filthy and destitute. Even the ones who make you uncomfortable. Even the ones who open fire on people in a house of worship, the ones who are terrified that being white is not enough anymore.

In matters of faith, any faith, we are all equals. The competitive world of business and job jockeying and money making puts the emphasis on being better than the next person, of rising to the top of the heap. In our houses of worship, we remember that real power comes from serving others in a spirit of compassionate equality.

When thinking about massacres at houses of worship, you may focus on the hatred that is directed at specific groups: Sikhs, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews and Christians. Every one of those has been the victim of a gunman with a desire to kill as many worshipers as possible. You may focus on the racial divide between blacks and whites, although the churches of both have been terrified by gunmen and arsonists in their places of worship.

Despite the labels politicians use to divide us, those of us who worship have much in common, beginning with the statements in the opening paragraph of this article. That is why an attack of any kind on any place of worship evokes mourning and loving concern from other places of worship.

Worshipers are killed in mosques, temples, and churches not only for their ethnicity, not only for their religion, but because we have a power the shot guns can’t reach. We have the power of love. We can take all of those differences and divisions society has made and create the kinship of a family.

In houses of worship, there are no political parties, no PACs, no factions. Mega-churches and popular evangelicals – notably, Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee, Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Franklin Graham – have obviously lost their way on this one, carving out distinctly political positions. In such places, people are divided into welcome and unwelcome, holy and unholy, deserving and undeserving.

True faith communities go on loving everyone equally no matter the politics or the policies. Practicing our faith means taking care of the hungry and homeless, the poor and the stranger, the lost and the outcast. Prayer and communion with other loving souls, in any faith tradition, is part of striving to be the best human being we can be.

Those who gather together in worship possess a compelling moral authority. That power is a threat to the high and mighty, to the supremacists who believe that they are superior to the ones they vilify.