Rage Against Asphyxiation

I sat on a small plastic green chair yesterday as school chapel was about to begin. It is a weekly moment. It used to be (how often do we use those words now) that the entirety of the school would gather together in the sanctuary to sing, dance, talk, listen, pray, but now that the worship world has paused, we are separated to classrooms to watch worship take place on screens.

The call to worship was spoken: the leader's hand was raised in the air for blessing - 'We begin in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.' - and she made the sign of the cross towards the screen. We had invited God to be involved in the process.

I looked around as the invocation was being spoken. The room was chock full of four and five-year-olds, their eager expressions redolent with joy. Worship was an exciting departure from what could sometimes be mundane. Their little heads, faced forward, expectantly awaiting what would come next, seemed to bob in anticipation.

And then, without warning, a youtube advertisement came up. As always, it is without warning, without choosing and generally without tact. A video game character, a menacing man garbed in black with an equally menacing automatic machine gun, popped up and began shooting. Because the children were only meters away from the screen, the reality shocked, started and scared them. I felt so badly for the teacher - there was nothing he could have done - but he stretched out in front of the screen, protecting the children and their eyes that were now scarred from a world that constantly confronts them with violence. The teacher turned the TV off, and a minute later, after the violent video game ad had passed, we resumed worship with a gentle song about God's love in the world.

This hyper-reality truly shocked me. It was an electric jolt, an awakening, to the present reality of this world which has experienced the same jolt in Minneapolis.

Most people, or white people (myself included), have been meandering through life oblivious to the present reality that faces the non-white world (which is most of the planet). If I am honest with myself, I invite God into my life not to transform my thoughts and beliefs, but to confirm them and my place in the world. I want to live a life blessed by comfort and then move seamlessly on to worshiping the God who has dispensed this comfort upon me (or so I make-believe).

And yet the truth and true reality of this situation is that God seems to be particularly worried about and for, all people who are persecuted, and God's judgement against those who are asleep, or worse yet, have closed their eyes to injustice and persecution, is written in large black ink many times throughout the Bible.

Take care of the widow, the orphan and the stranger. Do it.

Some people look from the outside at what happened to George Floyd and have made immediate judgements about it. I'm not talking about the situation in general, but the reality at large. Because I currently live in a different country than the United States, there are whispers both spoken and written online - 'Thank God we don't live in America' or 'I'm glad we don't have those kind of problems here.' Instead of feeling empathy, we have a warped sense of nationalism, that somehow our country is better than that one. Insert whichever nation you want, not just America. Instead of speaking out about the problem that all people of privilege, we instead turn a spiteful eye and pray 'Thank God we can get back to the normalcy of our lives.' I hope this is not a time where middle to upper class white people hole up in their middle to upper class homes to binge on Netflix until they can feel safe to come out of their middle to upper class caves to get back to their middle to upper class lives.

In a month, the media will have turned the page and their attention on to the next tragedy, the next horror story, the next shallow pool of fear in which we dive. We will get on with our lives, or that's what we want, and we will forget what happened to George Floyd.

That is exactly what we should not be doing. We should be experiencing George's last words, 'I can't breathe.' We should be fighting against the suffocating knee of injustice pressed against the throats of the world, instead of worrying about national interests. We should be inciting our governments to riot against this vicious, poisonous evil of racism - not to 'look into it,' but to do something - our leaders need to humble themselves, get down on that knee of choking privilege and beg forgiveness and respond with compassion, justice and grace.

The country in which I live, Australia, has had racial issues in the past. In the last decades, they have made public admissions and public apologies to the very people they had attempted to suffocate in the past. For this, I am amazed and grateful. I truly continue to pray that our words are not just puffs of air issuing from our throats and lips, but true calls to action.

Let those apologies be not just words, let it be a new reality and a new truth, that all people are created as equals. We are no longer valued by the countries in which we live or the countries from which we come, but valued because the air we breathe is precious to our identically shaped lungs, and the blood which collects the oxygen is exactly the same colour. We are valued because we are human brothers and sisters - borders and biases are irrelevant and unnecessary.

So today, I can't breathe. I'm suffocating on the sorrow of the people in Minneapolis - the community and its collective conscience. I want to be with people in this fight against injustice, but I have to get past the desire to shut my eyes, turn off the computer and look forward to the next week of my life when all this will be in the rearview mirror.

We must all stay present and focussed in this fight against asphyxiation.