Tonight the moon rose shrouded in clouds over the mountains, a color I couldn’t name. All afternoon and evening I had drawn inward, keeping vigil as I made supper and washed dishes and hung laundry in the soft dry air.
When the moon came up strange I stood there in kinship with everyone who has been hurt by the violence that takes hold of human beings when we forget that our whole purpose here on earth is to learn to love. I stood there with Jesus. I stood there with us all.
None of us is untouched. Together we are called to move from violence to love. “Violence multiplies violence,” wrote The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the slender volume of sermons I still have from my first semester at divinity school. “Hate cannot drive out hate,” he also said, “only love can do that.”