I’VE BEEN THINKING

As mass killings in schools, shopping centers, a Las Vegas concert, synagogues, and elsewhere have proliferated, we hear the now-routine response, “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families,” a phrase that has become an ugly social profanity. If the only thing we taught a newcomer to our country is that gun violence is now the leading killer of our children and teenagers, they would think with good reason that we are insane.

Our older grandson is a student at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. On Saturday, December 13th we got a text from his parents assuring us that he was safe during the shooting in a science building there. Two students were killed, nine others injured, but he was safely locked down with his roommates, as was his girlfriend with hers.

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Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

In the winter of 1959, our high school basketball team made it to the Los Angeles High School All-City Championship Tournament. In the first round we faced Jefferson High School, a perennial championship contender. To everyone’s surprise, we were down by a point and had the ball with seconds left when our best player was open with a jump shot from the corner. He took it, and missed: it bounced off the rim and out, the horn sounded to end the game and, exhausted, we shuffled to our bench.

Slouched with my teammates, I suddenly burst into tears, escalating into full-blown snot-nosed sobbing, repeatedly shouting No, no, no! Teammates, our couch, and our fans behind the bench went silent, staring, as I continued to sob and shout until I had emptied my emotions and wiped my wet face with my sweat-soaked jersey. To me it felt like hours; it was probably all of thirty seconds. Once I’d composed myself, no one said a word to me about my coming undone.

In the mid-1990s, for personal reasons, I left the white Episcopal parish I’d been a leader in for twenty years and began attending the robust, several-thousand-member progressive First African Methodist Episcopal church near downtown Los Angeles. I had grown up loving Black Gospel music, relished the emotionally expressive environment of Black worship, and thrived on the preaching of Cecil “Chip” Murray and his staff. We waved our arms as we sang, got down on our knees on the floor with our elbows on our pew to pray. The drummer in the worship band would play a brief rat-a-tat-tat when Chip hit a high point in his sermon, and we responded to preaching moments with Amen or Preach it. All of this was very much not like the more subdued worship of white Episcopalians.

I worshipped there for five years, but never really felt like I belonged. I was a visitor in a self-contained system and as much as I enjoyed being there, I was uncomfortable with how little attention was paid to my presence.

If I wore them very low on my waist, the gray slacks I’d worn to my high-school graduation two years earlier almost touched the tops of my black loafers. The white shirt and tie were fine, so all I needed was a proper jacket. I’d been invited to a party with friends from the large college group at my church, mostly upper-middle-class kids, so I wanted to look my working-class best. I didn’t have a sports coat or the money to buy one, so I searched through the small closet I shared with my father and younger brother and found a suit jacket Dad seldom wore. It was dark blue with thin white pin stripes; the sleeves didn’t quite reach my wrists, but it would have to do.

The rise of white Christian Nationalism in our country has prompted no shortage of comparisons to historical analogues. Although the most obvious example is Nazism in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, similar movements have risen in Hungary under Victor Orbán and in Turkey under Recep Tayyiip Erdoğan. These dictatorships have erased in their countries many of the post-World War Two advances in democracy.

But we don’t need to look abroad to find predecessors to our current American moment. At the same time the Nazis were emerging in Germany, an autocratic, destructive organization sharing many of the same values and tactics was terrorizing communities here at home.

My therapy clientele is mostly upper-middle-class and wealthy. I was aware of the first inklings in the mid-1990s of what became known as helicopter parenting. Moms and dads were often highly educated and experienced in managing careers and volunteer agencies. As parents, they exercised these skills with their children. If their child had a problem, they took parental pride in knowing the solution and providing it. If their child stumbled, rather than encouraging them to get up and brush it off they’d often pick them up, hug them as they whimpered more from frustration than pain, set them down gently, and let them continue playing.

Friendship is not just something I enjoy, it’s something I need. But it doesn't happen magically, no matter how easy the relationship might feel. As a pastor and therapist, I’ve listened to too many people – mostly men who work hellish hours in their climb up the ladder – talk about quality time. I learned from them, and from my own working hours as a pastor, that the only real quality time is plenty of time: time enough to relax together, time enough to catch up not only on work and the kids but on how we’re doing with one another, time enough to play together, to lie together touching, expressing the tenderness that says without words I’m so glad to be with you.

In 2016, I bought two bold RESIST! decals and slapped them on my car—not just as political protest, but as something deeper: an act of bearing witness. For most of my life, I’ve understood my identity as a Christian to include this obligation—to stand up, speak out, and be seen. But only recently have I begun to understand how profoundly tied that urge is to something even more personal: my need to feel noticed, valued, and affirmed.

On Memorial Day, I find myself reflecting on the quiet, personal stories of war—not just of battlefield heroism, but of memory, loss, and the scars left behind. My earliest memory is of Uncle Harry, fresh from World War II, buying me a baseball glove I’d use until high school. Fifty-five years later, I learned he’d kept our photo by his mirror all his life, praying for me nightly.

My father, a Navy dropout from the 1920s, wore his seaman tattoo and carried his wounds in the form of anger and alcohol. He never saw combat, but he fought his demons every day. And then there was J.—a childhood friend who went to Vietnam and returned deeply changed. His life unraveled in the shadows of PTSD, ending in heartbreaking isolation and tragedy.

These aren’t names on a wall in D.C., but they are warriors I remember. Some came back in body but never fully in spirit. This Memorial Day, I grieve not just for the fallen in war—but for those who fell after it, quietly, painfully, and unseen.