Violence and Place

At the park next to our home, about three years ago, I stood on the sidelines as a coach and saw a fight develop between my team and the other. 

Like most fights, it overshadowed its first cause. I can't remember who said what to get it going. I know that David, a striker who also plays American football for his school, was at the center of most of our fights that year.

But teams lined up according to the colors of their jerseys, shouted, and advanced toward one another across the small, dusty field. The referee shook his head and watched. I ran to the middle, demanding that my players calm down, waving the other team off, making eye contact with David. 

Probably because no one really wanted a fight, the lines dissolved, we gathered our gear, and everyone headed home.

Three years later, most of that team has graduated from high school. Two of them are in jail. Others have drifted to other teams. Some have stopped playing soccer for the sake of raising kids or working. The few who stayed together have formed a men's team, and I play with them every Sunday night.

David hasn't gotten into a single fight since I've been playing in this league. A large part of it, I'm sure, is the fact that he's been growing in character. I'd like to think that I helped set a tone of togetherness that helped remove violence from within the team during the years that I coached, but there were so many other factors that it's hard to make any claims.

I'm often the only white man on the field, and I feel my strangeness whenever I stop to think about it. But generally, we're out there playing together and yelling at one another and working together to win. I've earned the right to sink into the fabric of the place a little bit.

This morning I read in Genesis where God decided to release a flood on the earth. There's a lot about the wickedness of man and general rebellion, but when God finally identifies a specific behavior that exasperates him, it's violence. This comes on the heels of the story of Cain and Abel.

Violence is a dominant force in our neighborhood. Police use it to identify and contain my neighbors, fathers teach it to their children, alcohol and drugs exacerbate it, and kids nurture and practice it among themselves on the soccer fields, at school, and in their homes.

I think that in the modest arena of our soccer team, we've seen progress. And while Ruthie and I really can't claim credit for it, we can say that we've become part of the spread of peace by becoming part of the neighborhood.

I've been reading responses to violence in Gaza, Missouri and Iraq online. Someone did something to someone else, and someone got violent and did harm, and the other saw violence as a necessary response, and violence multiplied and claimed families then regions, and it seems to be ruling the world and claiming nations as its servants these days.

Bloodshed is being applied recklessly and out of scale with the problems it's supposed to be solving.

I can only add to this conversation a modest truth that I've learned in the few years that I've been living as a white person in a neighborhood peopled by those who our nation's system of violence has pursued, oppressed, and defined. 

Christlike love for neighbor is an antidote to violence which is available to any person willing to practice it. Christlike in the sense of entering into the neighborhood, encountering violence in its arena, and fostering grace there. 

This leaves those who claim to desire peace with an uncomfortable first step to take. To love neighbors out of the nightmare of violence, we have to be neighbors first. We have to step onto the field where the fight is brewing.