Why?

It’s the same question that we always come back to. Why? Why is it that even though we know it’s wrong, even though we’ve seen this over and over, we have another experience of a black person dying in a horrifically unjust way? Why is it that cops who got into their job to serve and protect somehow end up doing things like this? The question goes deeper though, I fear. The why question confronts me all the time. Why do people who know better still do terrible things? Why do people who have suffered hurt, hurt others? Why can’t I do the right thing even when I know that I should? The why question is deep and profound because it touches all of us. Maybe our questions aren’t played out for the world to see and debate on CNN or Fox News, but the why questions on the 24 hour news cycle echo our own. Why is it that even when we “know” better, we can’t “do” better?

You see, I don’t think that Derek Chauvin (or Thomas Lane, J.A. Kueng, or Tou Thao) woke up that May 25th morning hoping they would be part of killing a black man, George Floyd. I don’t think that Gregory and Travis McMichael jumped into their truck on Feb. 23rd to pursue Ahmaud Arbery with a plan to kill him. But in those stressful moments both of those unplanned events came to pass. The truth is that in moments of crisis we tend to react rather than to act. Something within us responds in ways that bypass our rational thinking and flows straight from somewhere deep within us. For the vast majority of us it happens in small and hardly noticed ways; an expletive yelled at someone who cuts you off in traffic, a thought wishing harm on someone who has hurt you, a quick lie in the interests of self-preservation in the moment, even though you know it will most likely come back to get you in time.

The why question has dominated a lot of my time. My vocational life is focused on helping people surrender to Jesus and live more like Him. But the reality is that in the moment of challenge it really doesn’t matter how much you know about Jesus. Those decisions are directed from a deeper, more subconscious place. You can know every story, be able to outline the theology of every book in the Bible, even have had a profound experience of conversion, and yet still fail to do what is right in any given moment. We are deeply wounded, and the healing from our wounds doesn’t come from having more knowledge.

I recently read My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Healing Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem. He’s a trauma therapist who has been grappling with the same question for years and has come to some very interesting conclusions. He writes,

“Why is there such a chasm between our well-intentioned attempts to heal and the ever-growing number of dark-skinned bodies who are killed or injured, sometimes by poiice officers? It’s not that we’ve been lazy or insincere. But we’ve focused our efforts in the wrong direction. We’ve tried to teach our brains to think better about race. But white-body supremacy doesn’t live in our thinking brains. It lives and breathes in our bodies.”

If you’re human I think you feel a sense of outrage at these events, but we’ve felt that before. The collective psyche of North America is reeling in pain, but we seem to keep circling back to the same place. The outrage is not enough to motivate change. We’ve been there before. The question of why never seems to get answered by the ever growing outrage, at least not in any way that brings about change.

The solution to the problem is deeper than the power of outrage as a means to change our direction. The pain evidenced by the rioters is real, and is completely reasonable. But that expression of the pain will not expose the root of it. It will not shine a light on a way to move forward as people who not only know that all races are created in the image of God but as a people who can actually live that way. Richard Rohr says that “if you cannot transform your pain you are doomed to transmit it.” What can actually transform this deep pain that lies below the surface of our lives?

Menakem says that the root of this is a deep trauma that humanity has absorbed over generations. He traces a fascinating historical story of how we have come to where we currently find ourselves. This trauma has become embedded in our very bodies, deeper than conscious thought. It shapes our ways of perceiving the world. We enter situations with our perceptions of those situations already slanted from what we have buried within us. We react to situations as a way to respond to and sometimes even to validate those perceptions. The pain that lies buried underneath gets passed on instead of exposed and transformed. His book is worth reading. It affirms my thinking that something deeper has to happen than posts on Facebook and movements calling for change. Our own hearts need to be excavated. The fears that lie deep within them, fears we may not even know exist, have to be exposed and dealt with. The only antidote to fear is love.

I have seen multiple times how love overcomes fear. When we know we are loved we feel safe to open up and be vulnerable. That’s one of the main reasons the love of God takes such a high place in what I try to teach. People change because they are loved, not because they are taught the right facts or because they are belittled to the point of feeling so much shame that they want to be different. Love overcomes a multitude of sins (1 Pet.4:8)

Can we move past this deeply embedded racism in our culture today? I don’t know. But I do know that if we come toe to toe with the love God has for each of us it allows to honestly admit our own failures. We can be honest about our own complicity in the racist systems in our world that cultivate and thrive on fear of those unlike us. As we rest in God’s love for us we can let those fears go and begin to love others as we have been loved. It doesn’t happen in a riot or protest. It doesn’t happen in a legislative body. It happens in a human body, free to love everyone else because it has first surrendered to the love of God for itself. This received love allows us to love others, both the oppressed and the oppressors. It starts with realizing the love of God for you and I and then allowing that love to flow out of us to everyone else. That’s where the change begins. It won’t answer the why question, but it shifts it.

Why not love as I have been loved? Why not?