“If you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you will surely die”.
When I was taught the story of Eden as a child I remember wondering how “knowledge” could make a person die. I could understand the idea that evil – either acted out, or enacted upon you – could make you die, that seemed like a basic law of the universe: cause and effect. But “knowledge” of both “good and evil”? Just understanding? Just perceiving basic concepts? What could be so wrong with this that it could cause death?
In the spring of 2005, I witnessed a murder.
We were living in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city rich with flavor, with music, with unique culture and a wild, burlesque kind of beauty. A city that struggled under the weight of immense poverty, corrupt government, extreme gun violence and the legacy of entrenched racism and historic enslavement.
This city sits sandwiched in a bend of the Mississippi River, hemmed in by water on every side. All the years we lived in New Orleans (eleven in total) my husband and I moved from house to house; always inching ourselves a little higher along the way. We had been lucky; arriving there in 1996 with literally nothing but a few hundred dollars and the clothes in our bags. Eight years later we were partners in a small real estate investment company; with a little extra cash in our pockets and three small children who were healthy and happy.
In New Orleans it was easy to find accommodation in the fine line between wealth and poverty. If you walked two blocks north from my house – the house we lived in, in the spring of 2005 – you would have found yourself surrounded by uptown Garden District mansions. And if you walked one block south you could likely have found a crack house, or a dilapidated squat.
It was a Saturday morning, around 10am. People on the block were out on their porches, children playing in the street. There was that good weekend feeling of freedom and festivity, the kind of feeling you have on a work-free day when the weather is fine. I had just strapped my three kids into the back seat of my car and was pulling out of my driveway, on my way to the grocery store, when I heard gunshot. Not in the distance, but somewhere very close. Not a pop, pop, pop, but a BANG, BANG, BANG.
“Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens (ages 1 to 19) in the United States. Every year, more than 21,000 children and teens are shot and killed or wounded.”
It is the strangest thing that when you need your mind and body to react quickly, with urgency and efficiency, in a possibly deadly situation, your mind and body decide to freeze! Time slows down. When I recall the events of these few deadly moments now it feels like they lasted for hours.
I was at the end of my driveway, looking back over my shoulder to reverse. People started running for cover, grabbing children and screaming. I don’t remember doing it, but my kids told me later that I yelled at them to “get down!”. I shifted gears and pulled my car forward, back toward our house. I think I was waiting for the gunshots to stop before exiting the car, but they just didn’t. BANG, BANG, BANG … on and on … would it ever stop? So loud, it was deafening.
In that long space of frozen time I realized that my littlest one couldn’t “get down” because she was strapped into a toddler car seat. I was fumbling, starting to unbuckle my seatbelt with some kind of plan that I would climb over the driver’s seat and lay on top of my kids, when I heard another noise, a slap against my driver’s side window.
It was a hand. The hand of my neighbor. She was yelling, “Get the f#ck out your car!” Her screaming woke me up out of my shock-stupor and then with the help of my husband, who had heard the shots and come running, we managed to unbuckle all three kids and get them safely into the house, ducking as we ran.
In the middle of all this commotion – again, like slow motion in my memory – I saw where the shots were coming from. A large white SUV with tinted windows was rolling slowly down our street, the window cracked just enough for a handgun to be firing bullets recklessly into the air. The intended victim, a teenage boy, was lying at the end of our block, spread eagle on the ground with his bicycle beside him. He was riddled with bullets.
Once the shooter was safely out of sight people began to emerge from their homes again. It wasn’t long before there was a sizable crowd around the body. I stayed on my porch and watched from a distance. Too shaken to cry, or even to know if I ought to cry.
It’s well known in the hood that the police don’t come when you call – at least, not right away. It was a full forty-five minutes that boy lay dead, bleeding on the tarmac, before the police arrived. This was not our first murder in the short two years that our family lived on that block. There had been another drive-by just months before, but that one had been in the evening and we hadn’t seen the victim, just the car as it rounded the corner onto our block, still spraying bullets. One of which went through our living room window, into the ceiling. A window where my five-year-old son had been standing just moments before.
The day after this second deadly incident my husband found us an apartment in another part of town; signed a lease and we packed up and left.
Loading the moving truck that day, little Sherrita, the daughter of my neighbor, a wonderfully candid nine year old, who liked to help me with my garden and always had a thousand questions, came solemnly to tell us goodbye.
“I know why you’re leaving.” she said. “It’s because you don’t want to live in a Black neighborhood.” She didn’t say it with any kind of accusation in her voice. She said it mournfully, as if in some way she felt the weighty burden of this whole brutal situation on her far-too-small shoulders.
On reflection, I’m sure she did. Nine years old is far too young to have witnessed so much violence so regularly. To be honest, I’m not even sure she was referring to our skin color differences when she said it. It felt much more like she was saying, “You don’t want to live where this keeps happening.” And that was true, I didn’t. No one did. I found myself choked with tears. I don’t recall my response; except that I hugged her.
“63% of child and teen gun deaths in the United States are homicides.”
Later that summer, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The city was completely changed. We lived there for two more years. Just long enough to repair the storm damage to our home and then to find a new one in Colorado.
I put the incident – the murder – somewhere far away in my mind and tried to forget it.
I think for a long time, without even realizing it consciously, I hated that man with the gun. The murderer. I never saw his face, but I hated him, I hated what he’d done. I hated that he’d made me feel so afraid, and that he’d had the power to do that. To cause me and mine trauma. To make us flee from our home.
I hated that day … the taste, the flavor, the memory of it. I never went there in my mind. I hated the whole stinking thing. I hated poverty and the glorification of gang life. I hated whatever had caused such reckless murder, such violence. I hated that it had threatened my kids. I hated that I had been there and that I had let it come so close; so paralyzed, so unable to protect them.
Then, just a few years ago, during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the summer of 2020, it all came flooding back to me. I think it was the heightened discussion of police corruption that brought back the memory of how little care the authorities had given the murdered boy, shot from his bicycle that day. Perhaps it was the memories of living in a city where the police are considered your enemy. And of course it was the gun violence, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, the senselessness of their deaths, the tragic absurdity of how neglectful, how hateful, how violent we can be as a society … our free America.
Whatever caused it, the door to the memory of that day sprung open and I found myself reflecting with honesty – with honest shame – that I really didn’t know how to love my enemies. Not in this case anyway. I had no desire to love the man with the gun, spraying bullets just over the heads of my children. Their lives meant nothing to him and that filled me with rage.
I hated him and it wasn’t even my child he’d killed. For the first time since the day of the murder I let myself think about him; about both of them: the murderer and the victim.
The victim was just a kid, seventeen years old. The drive-by had been gang-related. Retribution for some other act of violence, to which further retribution had been carried out later. Family members gunned down in retaliation; an endless cycle of tit-for-tat, a life for a life.
Up until 2020, I had never let myself wonder how his mother or father or brothers missed him after he died. People called it a drive-by, this was the preferred method of execution in the hood. It was commonplace. Most people, it seemed, had a cousin, a friend, a brother who had died in a “drive-by”. But when I let myself think about the incident all these years later, I realized that “drive-by” was just a softened term for a brutal, agonizing, public execution. An easier word than murder. A way to distance ourselves from the reality of a slaughtered child.
And in truth, it was the murderer himself I needed to let myself think about. This nameless, faceless person who had owned such a deep place of hatred in my psyche for so long, it was a secret, even to me! Until I looked at it, until I admitted it.
Me with all my fine ideas about forgiveness, about loving our enemies, about the choice to love, about non-violence. My heart was full of violence toward him. I wondered if he was still alive. If he had murdered any, or perhaps many more people. Had he found any peace? Any love and redemption in his life? Was he in jail? Did he ever escape a destructive lifestyle or does he relish it still? Did he have a choice to become what he became? A child killer. Or was it just the path life led him down?
Becoming Death and Becoming Love.
“He made him who did not know sin to be sin for our sake, so that through him we might become the righteousness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21
“Christ redeemed us from that self-defeating, cursed life by absorbing it completely into himself … That is what happened when Jesus was nailed to the cross: He became a curse, and at the same time dissolved the curse.
Galatians 3:13
I thought and I thought about that man. About my soul’s reaction to his actions: cause and effect. I thought about Christ, and my own experiences with suffering. Did I really, in light of this man, believe that Christ became sin for us? Could I believe that he willingly became this? Not just a child killer, but a person willing to kill anyone who was on the street that day … women, babies, grandmothers … no one’s life mattered to him.
Did Christ become this kind of absurd maddening violence, did he take it into himself and destroy it? Becoming it so he could absorb it, transform it? Could that be real? In that case, Jesus truly became the very thing that murdered him that day at Golgotha. He became senseless violence that leads to brutal death.
Did he become both: the boy bleeding in the street, and the murderer taking the shots? Two lives undone, both souls crushed and torn by a senseless grab for identity, a lust for power in a small world of drug kings and little war lords.
Did he become the mother who heard the news that day that her son was gone?
Did he become little Sherrita’s burden, the hurt of belonging to a place where people don’t want to live?
Is this the knowledge that kills us? Witnessing a murder, all of our individual lives, the fallout from the knowledge of it? The knowledge of the good those two lives could have been, and the knowledge of the death and heartache they became.
Is “understanding” a manifest body? A seeing that can’t be unseen? Does knowledge metastasize its way into our being at a cellular level, leaving no part of us unaffected, all of us subjected to its “death”? All of us required to pass on its energy, either as resentment, prejudice and anger – or transformed into love, forgiveness and peace?
“Approximately three million American children witness gun violence every year”
When I reckoned with all of this, when I allowed myself to feel my own failings in the sum of it, I found myself picturing a different kind of crucifixion than any I’d ever seen in church pamphlets or paintings. It was the ugliest thing, the most hideous, naked, perverse, twisted human creature; crushed in the crucible of violent death.
It was Christ-become child killer, God-become grieving mother, Son of Man-become a boy riddled with bullets. The ugliness of us all, nailed to a cross. The GOD/Human, slaughtered and struck through. Become death for us.
Often when I am struggling with concepts too deep for words, I put pen to paper and try to draw what I am feeling. This was the sketch that emerged from my contemplation of Christ becoming the slaughter that happened that day.
After I had spent some time on the inner work of grief for the memory of that day, and repentance for the hate it had kept burning in me all these years, I was suddenly struck by a new found memory, contained within the old one.
This memory is about my neighbor. The lady who had thumped on my car window and woke me out of shock so that I could react and get my kids to safety.
This particular neighbor lived two doors down from us. She was married with two teenage sons. Both she and her husband worked in downtown New Orleans in tourism jobs – easy to find, but never very high paying. In the mornings, we had noticed, they often left very early for work. This, they told us, was because, rather than send their kids to an inner-city school with very poor educational standards and little hope of further education, they had enrolled their boys at a school in the suburbs, which meant much more opportunity for their sons, but also a long daily commute back and forth for the parents.
That day, while we watched the crowd disperse as the police finally arrived, she came over to my porch and apologized for shouting at me through the car window. I told her there was no need for an apology and thanked her for her help in the moments of crisis. Then she told me that just moments before, she had taken her oldest son, her sixteen-year-old, over there onto the street to look at the boy who had been killed.
“I made him look at that dead boy” she said, “I made him look right at him. And I told him, I know it might seem easier to make money selling crack than it is to work hard in school, but this is what will happen to you if you choose that path.”
She didn’t tell me this like it was some righteous move she’d made; or some sentimental moment from the script of a movie about boys from the hood. No, in fact, she almost whispered it, as if there was a holy fear, an understanding within her whole being of the truth of it. She’d seen these deaths once too often and she couldn’t let the fate of this murdered boy become the fate of her sons.
In consciously forgetting about this day, I had also forgotten about this lady and her role in it all. It wasn’t until I let myself remember her in 2020 that I realized, by running toward me, to get me out of my car, she must have risked her own safety! Her home was in the opposite direction, but she had run toward me! She must have seen me, frozen in fear. Seen my babies in the back of my car and risked her own life to come save mine!
The mystics say that Christ placed himself at the intersection of universal opposites – and he held them together within himself. That he was a third way, one who could hold the irreconcilable human paradox of life and death, heaven and hell, human and divine, between the love of his friends and the hatred of his accusers, between our inner selves and our outer lives. That he didn’t deny the ugliness, the shame of the human condition, but looked it square in the face, refusing to turn his gaze away, until he had lovingly transformed it within himself.
If that is true, then what I met that day in my neighbor from New Orleans, was a woman who had taken up her “cross” at that very same intersection. We weren’t close friends, but she’d shared with me enough
about her life that I knew she had family members in prison. I knew that she drove back and forth from the suburbs before and after work, because she wanted a better life for her children. She wanted her boys to be free from the kind of tyranny, the wrecking ball of poverty and crime, that was so evident in our neighborhood.
She stood at the intersection of this – her life – and she refused to take her gaze away. She looked the reality of death, square in the face. She made her own life the transforming catalyst, the bridge between hell and a more peaceful place. A future where her kids could find a fuller life. She even risked herself, her own safety to save a neighbor who couldn’t move in a deadly moment of panic!
She transformed the energy sent her way that day: fear, bullets, the threat of death. She took it and transformed it into love. Love for her neighbor – and fierce, stern, discerning love for her son. Love that would not allow him to take the path that could only lead to violence and death.
When I saw her in my mind, saw her properly with my heart’s eye, all these years later, I knew that I was recognizing the divine-human pathway of Christ. The cross, the intersection where she has placed herself in this life – and it was truly incredible! It was the transforming agent of Love. Fierce, tender divine-human Mother love.
Love is the mother
the fierce courage
between the gun
And her son
Christ is the sister
the savior
laying down her life
for her neighbor
Love is the catalyst
the breath
transforming death
She resurrects
Christ is the woman
at the intersection
seeding the ground
for resurrection
* Gun violence statistics from EveryTown for Gun Safety.
