Bootless cries

It doesn't rival 9/11 in size, but the insane act itself is inherent with a similarly cold calculus. It was artful, diabolically and deliberately planned. Charleston AME isn't just any church, and not just any Black church. It is the most prominent, most celebrated, most storied African-American church in the land, the oldest surviving congregation of its genre and denomination. The community around it called Charleston AME "Mother Church."

The killings were not random. This kid, mad with hate, got in his car, drove what?--a hundred miles, then sat in the pews with his victims for an hour before pulling out his birthday-present and murdering nine of the people with whom he'd been praying.

His hate had to be insane. 

He looks like a child. He is someone's. Those who died might have thought the angel of death to be nothing more than a mixed-up boy looking for a Savior. The preacher, a state senator, let the flop-haired kid sit beside him.

When once again President Obama talked about this particular brand of  American horror, his face wore a weariness in all of us, even though his anguish is different and deeper than mine--different because I am white, after all and he's only half. When Barrack and Michelle Obama--and their girls--look at the faces of the dead, he sees himself and his children more clearly than I ever will. How he and Michelle talk to their daughters about what happened will be different from what my own children might say to theirs. What they say touches somewhere within a different identity. 

Charleston's "Mother Church" has a storied history that includes association with one of America's few slave revolts, an 1821 planned uprising church historians remember as the Vesey Revolt, a revolution that never happened because white folks discovered it was in the offing and therefore burned the Charleston AME to the ground. That's a chapter of Mother Church's history.

Those white folks, inflamed by hate and fear, determined it illegal for black people to worship God together--too dangerous. Made it the law of the land in the Bible Belt. It must be difficult for shiny-faced American exceptionalists to admit such things, but good white Bible-believers determined that slaves could not, under penalty of law, worship the Maker of heaven and earth together. No. 

That story belongs to Charleston AME, where a baby-faced hater named Dylann Storm Roof murdered nine members of a Bible study two nights ago. This horror wasn't without design. 

No white person ever died in the Vesey Rebellion, but on July 2, 1822, Vesey himself and five others were executed for their crimes after a city-appointed tribunal condemned them to death. That story belongs to Charleston AME.

Criticism of the outcome of that whole event didn't die in the slave-holding community. So many more slaves were arrested that July and August, 67 convicted of conspiracy, another 30 of those executed. That story--all of that story--belongs to Charleston AME.

What do we tell our kids? 

The weariness on President Obama's face, the sick sadness that was inescapably there in the slump of his shoulders yesterday--it does belong to all of us.

At least all of those who are sane. 

And who can argue with the gun people? If Rev. Pinckney had been carrying a .38 two nights ago, he could have plugged the kid before getting plugged. Yeah. He could have. It's time for all of us to strap on sidearms, so saith the gun lobby.

Wednesday's tragedy belongs to Charleston AME, but it's Barrack and Michelle Obama's too and it's ours, all of ours; it's mine, way out here in Alton, Iowa, a world away, the Floyd River running swiftly and softly just a few rows of corn away. It's our history, our story. 

In the President's frightful weariness yesterday, I couldn't help read a tired King David who, when there were no words, used to say his very bones cried out to God. What the President knows--what Charleston AME knows, what all of us who believe in an incarnate God believe--is that when there is simply nothing more to say, nothing more that can be said and nothing left to feel, when our very exhaustion cries out to God, the Spirit himself intercedes, gives us utterance, as the Bible says, "with groanings too deep for words."

There is no consolation but this for President Obama, for the Mother Church, for any of us who believes: He hears us, even in our deepest wordless silence.