Back-to-school Sunday

Our country—or the advertising industry—seems to have a special name for every day: Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, Love Your Dog Day, Eat More Vegetables Day, and so on. Churches have special days too, besides holy holidays, like Youth Sunday and Reformation Sunday, but I recognized one today and wondered if churches consciously name the last Sunday before school Back-to-School Sunday. The whole service had a different feel about it, an anticipatory vibrancy.

In my family I’m very aware of what our minister called the energy and buzz that surrounds the opening of school. Jacob heads into his senior year in high school, Morgan begins college at Texas Tech, and the rest continue their educational path without milestones. I am so proud of each of them and so excited to watch their progress this year. But a part of me is a bit frightened, and I pray for my family. The church service this morning brought that home to me.

At our church after summer absences, we had most ministers back and an almost full choir, a sure sign that the new year begins. The service was highlighted by dozens of youngsters, maybe pre-K to third grade, who crowded the chancel steps and the floor in front, most with their backpacks, to be blessed. Perhaps this should be called Backpack Sunday.

There they were, with a few anxious parents hovering about.  Be still my heart! It has been ten or twelve years since Jacob was in that crowd, but it seems like yesterday. And those children looked so young and innocent and vulnerable.

It suddenly hit me about those sweet youngsters—and my grands. They may not only be nervous, which the minister acknowledged, but they may be downright scared. Is this the year a shooter will visit their school? Will they survive the year? Texas has done nothing significant to protect them or control guns since the massacre at Uvalde. You can stil buy an assault rifle at eighteen with no license, no training, and only a cursory background check. Schools will have armed personnel, which may well lead to more deaths, not fewer. I suspect more than a few schools, desperate to conform to the law, are hiring untrained personnel. And more guns just mean more shooting and more chance of accidents.

There has been one special session of the legislature, at Abbott’s call, to deal with taxes, and apparently, he will call another to try once more to push through his pet idea of school vouchers, which will render public education more ineffective than ever. But no special session on guns. Legislators were busy during regular session banning books and outlawing drag queens. The argument, of course, is that we must protect our precious children. But don’t dare come for the parents’ guns! Somehow too many Texans don’t feel their children are threatened by guns, despite the numerous school shootings our state has seen under Abbott’s governance.

Abbott, whose firm hand controls what goes on in this state, is not a man known for his compassion. And he makes no exception for children. In addition to nearly turning a blind eye to school shootings, he is allowing children to be killed at the border by razor wire and by neglect on buses illegally transporting asylum seekers to “safe” cities. He has issued not one word of regret about the child’s body found floating in the Rio Grande nor about the infant that died on a bus to Chicago. He may, however, have gotten too big for his britches: assaulting asylum seekers violates the Geneva Convention, which theoretically could leave him liable for charges from the World Court at The Hague. And now, Texas twin politician brothers, the Castros, are asking President Joe Biden to halt Abbott’s forced bus trips. Abbott’s entire handling of the border violates Federal law and is now in the courts, but for asylum-seeking parents with young children, the courts move way too slowly.

You may think it’s a leap from those earnest little kids on the chancel steps this morning—some did look a bit bored—to immigrant children dying at Texas’ hands, but it’s really not. Those deaths—and pray there are not more—speak to what kind of state we live in, what kind of people we are, because we tolerate them. We elect the men and women who pass harsh laws without a trace of humanitarianism, who tolerate the far-right demands for guns, including assault rifles which no civilian needs. If we want to protect the kids at my church, where my grandson was not too many years ago, we have to protect all children. We have to extend our love.

“Three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and of these love is the greatest.”