Yet another mass killing: Can only our faith communities save us from ourselves? On loving more, and hating less...

I visited Auschwitz as a seventeen-year-old college freshman. To say that the experience was a powerful one for me would be a gross understatement. Seeing what remains of a camp in which over one million people were killed was gut-wrenching. It was impossible for my young mind to comprehend that any human beings could harbor such hatred and commit such acts of cruel violence against any other human beings. I could only imagine the suffering of those who were held in a place where the best conditions were not compatible with human life. It seemed that the smell of burning flesh still emanated from the crematorium.

Visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, just two days ago brought all of the painful memories flooding back. The names Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka – the six Nazi extermination camps in Poland – have become synonymous with massive death and suffering. I continue to wonder how any group of people could have justified the calculated killing of others made in the same image and likeness of God with seemingly no sense of concern or remorse for the taking of human lives.

As a seventeen-year-old, I really hadn’t connected the atrocities of the Holocaust with other horrid examples of “man’s inhumanity towards man”: the enslavement of Hebrews by the Egyptians; the enslavement of many during the Roman Empire; the participation in the African slave trade by Great Britain, a number of European countries, and ultimately, the United States; the killing of an estimated 10 million Congolese during the exploitative reign of Belgium’s King Leopold; and the genocide in Rwanda. Today, I look at all of these events along our historical continuum and surmise that our disregard for the value of other human life is astonishing.

And it seems that history repeats itself over and over again.

In our country today, it's not the names of death camps, but rather the names of communities like Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, Charleston, San Bernadino, and now, Orlando that have become linked with acts of violence and senseless loss of life. (A sad compilation of mass shootings in this country since 1982 can be found at http://time.com/4368615/orlando-mass-shootings-chart/.)

I suppose that if one sees another human being as less than human, it becomes much easier to make a decision to take another life.

I’ve said before that we can legislate lots of things, but we can’t legislate hearts. I truly believe today that what we need our government (executive, legislative or judicial branch) can't give us. What we need today can only be given by our faith communities being at work in the world, as an example of a better way of living, and encouraging us all to love more and hate less. If our faith communities aren’t opening their doors to invite in those who are lost, and if we who are inside aren’t stepping out, going about and showing love to those who need us, then it seems that our communities of faith serve no purpose at all. We need to make our presence felt in schools and offer children both help and hope. We need to provide food and shelter to the poor. We need to bring all of our resources to bear to help connect people to work, and to accessible care for physical and mental illness. But more than anything, we need to erase the lines that divide us into races, classes, ethnicities, “groups” and abilities, so that we all may look at one another as children made in the image and likeness of our creator God. We can’t leave to government the work that has truly been given to us who are part of faith communities to do.

It’s been quite some time since the song, “Wake up, Everybody,” (recorded by Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, lyrics by John Whitehead, Gene McFadden and Victor Carstarphen) was a popular hit, but its message still rings true: It’s time for all of  our communities of faith to wake up, and get to work.

Wake up, everybody,

No more sleepin' in bed.
No more backward thinkin',
Time for thinkin' ahead.

The world has changed
So very much
From what it used to be
There is so much hatred
War and poverty.

The world won't get no better
If we just let it be.
The world won't get no better.
We gotta change it, yeah,
Just you and me.