Thoughts on Knoxville

We think of our beautiful church on Fern Street as a place of safety. It’s a place of music, of prayer, of worship, of the best of life. It seems far removed from the heartache of a wounded world.
But yesterday’s assault on a sister congregation in Knoxville, where Unitarian Universalists had gathered to watch their children sing, shows how easily a house of God can become a charnel house.
When a liberal-hating, broken-down man pulled a shotgun from a guitar case at the door to the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church and began firing at worshippers, he made it all too clear that he preferred blood to brotherhood.
We can, I suppose, be grateful that the toll wasn’t greater, that the children survived, that the dead at this point are two older churchgoers, at least one of whom deliberately took a blast himself to protect others.
But it’s not especially comforting to contemplate that there are people out there – who live in our own culture and grew up at our sides – who hate what UUs stand for enough to slaughter us for it. It speaks to a divide that has grown too wide, to a willingness by too many to fan the flames of hatred. That an unemployed, mentally ill man would imagine that gunning down Unitarians would bring him some measure of glory is downright sickening.
It also speaks to our own need to reach out to those with whom we disagree. We’re not faceless “liberals” who are somehow un-American. We are, as we know, rooted in our nation’s history and heavily invested in the endless struggle to make a better world.
What happened in Knoxville shows how far we have to go.