Rev Brigid prefaces her meditative message by reading the following letter from Patricia Pearce, sent to her readers on the day after the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas:
Dear Friends,
In the wake of the recent mass shootings, yesterday’s at an elementary school in Texas and last week’s at a grocery store in Buffalo, I wanted to briefly share what is mulling around in my mind today. It is this: our society practices human sacrifice.
We don’t call it that. We think we are so much more advanced than the civilizations that practiced ritual sacrifice. But it is human sacrifice, and it’s time we get clear about that and call it what it is rather than pretending it’s something else.
We don’t sacrifice our children to the Sun god, but do we sacrifice them to the Gun god. And if we look deeper still, we see that really we are sacrificing them at the altar of ego. It is the human ego’s hunger for power and profit that has created this weaponized culture which feeds on fear and fuels fear. Fear, after all, is the hallmark of the egoic mind, and what are guns if not the quintessential symbol of fear?
So in this moment, as we are reeling from the news of shooting after shooting after shooting, I ask us all to see what is happening clearly—not through the lens of judgment (which is just another kind of ammunition in the egoic arsenal) but through the lens of compassion.
To see clearly how utterly misguided we are. To see clearly how absolutely devoted we are to the concept of enemy. To see clearly that we are each all of the players in this saga: the child gunned down in the classroom, the church deacon gunned down in the grocery aisle, the shooter gone mad with rage or desperation, the gun manufacturer driven solely by a hunger for money, the Senator so captive to an ideology that he is blind to the insanity.
It’s time for us to acknowledge that this is US.
And, it’s time for us to acknowledge the truth that is completely unfathomable to the ego mind, that we are all held in Love and that nothing we do, or don’t do, can ever change that simple fact.
Peace,
Patricia
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