It’s time for me to think about brokenness, mine and yours and Robert Bowers, the man who killed eleven people at a worship service on Saturday.
Bowers broke many hearts on Saturday, he wounded a lot more people than he killed. He took a chunk out of my heart.
Bowers is not from another world, he is very much from ours, one of us.
He reflects us.
We are a broken country today, and in the midst of all the posturing and grieving and finger-pointing (we just get more broken) I wanted to think a bit about this profoundly shattered man – Bowers – and how his life slipped into madness and murder without any one noticing, helping or taking any kind of responsibility for him.
His high school classmates can’t even recall his name of face. He was, said one of them “a ghost.” For sure.
I believe very strongly that we are all responsible for what we do.
The mentally ill are often blameless for what they might do, but that doesn’t mean they are not responsible for what they do.
But I know that I, too, am responsible, for the Robert Bowers of our time, the broken men – it is almost always a man – who never ask for help, get help, or even seem to need help.
This post is about me, really, and who I wish to be.
Now, when we scramble to understand who a forgotten or lost soul is, we wait until they kill or die and then scour their social media posts for clues as to who they were.
That is the only way they can ever be known.
It took one deranged man to slaughter 11 innocent people, but to me, it takes a whole village, perhaps a whole country, to create and nurture and unleash a Robert Bowers.
So many things went into the making of this man, once invisible, then all too visible.
In our increasingly Old Testament society, our idea of justice is vengeance, and eye for an eye. Our idea of justice for an insane and profoundly sick man is to kill him, as if that will deter other broken, insane and profoundly sick men from doing the same thing the next time something they see or read turns them monstrous.
Instead of asking how he came to be, we ask instead how quickly we can kill him.
If you read about his life, we gave him all the tools he might ever have wanted to find meaning and focus for his sickness – callousness, indifference, thousands and thousands of posts and pages and tweets and retweets about hate and false danger and demonization.
After the murders, there were many thousands more posts and pages full of hate. Hate simply breeds more hate.
These posts were there before Saturday, are there today, will almost surely be there tomorrow while we all wring our hands about unity and blame.
In our increasingly hateful public dialogue, we have lost all respect for empathy, and the compassion that empathy brings. He killed eleven people. We’ll kill him. We don’t need to go or think much farther.
Bowers was on Twitter for much of his life, social media was his incubus of hate. How could he even possibly know what empathy is?
The term empathy is generally defined as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking.
Pastors and philosophers have long considered empathy to be the highest level of human understanding, wisdom and compassion.
Every major faith calls upon its followers to embrace empathy and put ourselves in the shoes of others, especially the broken, the despised, and the helpless.
To me, Robert Bowers is all of those things, broken, despised, helpless and gravely ill. It is important for him to be somehow held accountable for what he did.
It is important to me to be held accountable for what I have done. He is a broken man, I am a broken man, and almost all of the people I know or read about our broken.
At the end of the day, I have to ask, what kind of man do I really wish to be. Another member of the howling mob, pointing fingers everywhere and then running back into our lives to hide.
In the world we are creating, we are all responsible for Robert Bowers. We don’t help the mentally ill get help, or pay for it, we flood our world with lethal weaponry no other society tolerates, we model their own bloodlust with ours.
It’s easy enough to kill him and wipe our hands clean of the blood, harder to look at ourselves.
The bottom line for me is that I don’t care to be a hater. I don’t hate the left or the right, and I don’t want to even hate him.
I know I am broken, too, just in different ways. I use my writing as a means of dealing with loneliness and fear and shame rather than guns.
My own brokenness reveals something about who I am. The way I am broken reveals who I am. And who he was. Suffering and pain are not simply troubling interruptions in our busy lives, they touch us and shape us in the deepest and most individual of ways.
Each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers. We can preach all we want about empathy and compassion, but it seems we only feel those things for people we like and identify with. As for the others, send them off and kill them and get them out of our consciousness.
Vengeance is cleansing, it wipes our own conscience clean. The shrinks say that the first step in healing is not to run away from the pain, but to rush towards it and embrace it.
So I want to think about Robert Bowers and explore the idea that he is us, we helped to create him, he helps to shape us. A part of me would love to hate him, a part of me want to say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry there was no help for you.
The great truth of the spiritual life is that everything we live or do or think or f eel, be it happiness or grief, health or sickness, life or death, is its own lesson, part of the universal journey to fully realize our humanity. We learn the most from the darkness, not the light.
It doesn’t take a hero or warrior to condemn his unspeakable acts. It takes a hero or a warrior to understand them, and to share in the taking of responsibility.
As I grow older, I am learning a hard lesson: there is often very little we can do for others, except in small ways. People can only save themselves. And I can only try to save me.
Thomas Jefferson said of the citizens of the future; “they will get the world they deserve.” So be it. Robert Bowers is, in fact, our ghost. His shadow will be on many walls.
I want to see and understand the brokenness in Robert Bowers, perhaps it will help me to heal the brokenness in me.