I feel that the people reading this and I are bound together today by the righteousness of the powerless. I have to accept what I can’t control and resolve to do what I can control.

We can only turn to ourselves and our wounded hearts and souls for comfort and wisdom. How do we keep hope alive within ourselves when so many innocent people are sacrificed to the darkest side of humanity and moral cowardice?

I look to the moral law inside of me, not outside of me.

The only place I can turn to for help this morning is me. Immanuel Kant said two things filled him with admiration and awe, the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

I can’t tell other people what to feel or believe, I can only look inside of me, and be me; to do good and to try to be good.

I was up half the night thinking about whether I should write about El Paso and Dayton, and what I should say. I was not able to write a word. Here I was, a writer out of words.

Everything I wrote sounded like a cliche, exhausting arguments falling on deaf ears.

What is there, really, to say, that has not been said, or feel, that has not been felt?

For me, the challenge is to keep looking and empathizing with something so commonplace and predictably awful, it has its own rhetoric and ritual. We know all know what terms like “active shooter,” and “First  Responder,”  and  “AK-47 and “Extra Magazines” mean, they no longer need to be explained.

They have entered the common language and understanding.

We no longer are startled at the sight of armored cars careening into shopping malls and bars downtown, or corporate offices turned bloody,  or small children playing dead on schoolroom floors or fleeing from elementary schools with their hands up.

To me, these are the false and dispiriting illusions of a culture that wants to take every step but the right step it, spend all the money it takes to pretend, but none to solve or protect.

This deadens the spirit and hardens the heart. It’s hard to feel hope when confronted with something that seems so hopeless.

I always thought that it was the most elemental duty of government to protect our children and us from danger, slaughter, and injury at the hands of people who are either broken or wish to bring us harm.

It isn’t that nothing can be done. The awful truth is that nothing is being done. It’s hard for me to know how to live with that.

The thing I feel most is powerless. The thing I need to do is good, and still more good.

Still, I am clear about one thing when I look in the mirror each day; this is not a time for people of conscience to be silent. The only thing I control in this work is the moral law inside of my head.

So I need to say something, to be quiet is to be complicit.

Early this morning, I got up and went into solitude. I prayed for the dead and wounded and their families, and sat in silence in their honor. That makes me feel better but does nothing for them, or the next shopper, or child or worshipper.

The people in Dayton and El Paso or Tampa or Virginia Beach or Thousand Oaks or Pittsburgh or Annapolis or Santa Fe or Parkland or Las Vegas or Sutherland Springs or Newtown Elementary Schoo did not die for their country, or by the hand of nature.

They died for absolutely nothing other than to preserve the fecklessness and corruption of the people sworn to protect them, but who have betrayed them, again and again.

Anger is pointless; I’m not going to go there. There is plenty of outrage in the air; perhaps I can be useful in a different way. No one is asking me to go on cable news, and I wouldn’t go if they did.

I did find inside of me this morning what it is that I wanted to say.

For me, the answer is to look away from the political – everything that can be said has been said – and towards the spiritual.  We all know what the right thing to do is for us, and the right thing to do is our salvation. It means something.

There is comfort there, not for the victims or their lovers, friends, and family, but for those of us who sit outside this circle from Hell.

It is beyond me to forgive.

We need to forgive and be forgiven every hour, every day, not just once. That, says philosopher Henri Nouwen, is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak and broken that is the human family.

We share this: we are all faced with the reality of our powerlessness in the community of people who care.

I need to accept what I can control and what I can’t control. I can’t force other people to believe what I believe.

I can only do the best I can for as long as I can.  But that is something that I can do. There is always something.

That’s all I have to offer myself.