My Charlottesville

All cultures have crisis, events that shock and dismay us and call us to self-examination.  The United States of America is no different.  Technology and popular media has now given us not only access to these crises but replays them hour after hour convincing us that we are hope-less, a country defined by the worst of us.  Then as technology provides we begin to print out judgments, not only on the guilty, but also on entire segments of our population, holding our country guilty as if we know the hearts and minds of every American.  I am guilty.  I carry the seed of racism, bitterness, judgment and bigotry in me and have allowed those seeds to germinate even after I tear them out by their roots.  I am guilty.  But so are you.  We all are.  I cannot carry the burden of all citizens of America and of all the pain they cause nor that has been inflicted upon them.  But I have found one great truth that seems to always apply to me; I can carry the burden of my neighbor.  I have four, a white Vietnam Vet, a door gunner in a Huey, and his wife, a black widow who has lost her husband and daughter in the last three years and now is raising her granddaughter, an old widower who’s wife died this year and has now had to move into assisted living and a women and daughter who has lost everyone husbands, and grandmother who all use to live together.  These are my neighbors.  I would imagine if we, as Americans, would turn off our media and literally walk across the street we would find all manner of ways to be helpful and bear up the burdens of those that live in tragady.  Are those that decry the tragedy in Charlottesville aware of the private tragedies that occur to the souls just across their street?  

Habakkuk's Wound.  Sculpture Union art students made in solidarity with all our brothers and sisters in the world who are
dying for their faith.