Thoughts and prayers on thoughts and prayers
One of my group chats began blowing up yesterday afternoon at 3:15 as I was wrapping up at work. When I hit a lull about 15 minutes later, I scrolled down my notifications to find the first text that started it all.
“Charlie Kirk was just shot in the neck while speaking in Utah”
“While answering a question about mass shootings, btw”
My eyes widened. The fourth text in the thread summed up what I was feeling:
“holy shit, not much shocks me these days but fucking hell”
Fucking hell, indeed.
As I continued to catch up in the thread, I started opening up tabs: AP News, New York Magazine, Washington Post, Reddit. Scrolling through live updates, trying piecing together what was happening as it was happening, as we are wont to do with the breaking news that occasionally manages to get front and center of what feels like nothing but breaking news all day, every day.
Someone in the thread mentions a video. My wife, also in the group, says she saw it. Others in the group refuse to watch or seek it out.
It was, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, not hard to find the video on X. I saw the warnings in various Reddit threads: “Don’t watch this unless you know 100% for sure you can handle seeing someone die instantly.” “I just watched it. I wish I hadn’t.” “I’ll never be able to unsee this.” The idiot lizard brain in me, whose unfettered Internet access at way too young an age that eventually led to hours spent on 4chan boards during my early college years, said “Challenge accepted.”
Sitting in my car about to leave work, I watched the video. I actually watched it several times. Mostly because I simply could not believe what I was seeing. I will not go into details, of course. All I will say is that I have never seen blood exit the body like that. I have never seen shock followed by lifelessness across someone’s face like that, and so quickly. Instantly.
My first thought was that I hope his wife and children never see this, knowing they almost certainly will one day. The Internet is both ephemeral and eternal.
I looked up from my phone in a daze. I put the car in drive and started heading to the Y swim center in Randallstown, like I do every Wednesday. I did not put on my podcast. I did not turn on the radio at all.
I drove in silence for about a mile or two. Then I started talking.
“God? Dear God,” I began. I sighed. “I don’t even know what to say anymore.”
This is what I usually say or write before a deluge of words spill out.
For someone who is a lifelong Christian, I am particularly bad at praying. This is especially problematic since I am in discernment for rostered ministry. I should probably be a bit more intentional at figuring out my prayer life. I should also finish the entrance essay I began writing a year ago yesterday. Ah, well, nevertheless.
Prayer is interesting. To most people, prayer is a direct line to heaven for our wants, our needs, our pain, and (when we remember) our gratitude. We say the things on our mind and heart and from there, God does whatever They’re going to do. If a prayer gets answers “yes”, this is proof of its power. If answered “no”, well…it is still an answer.
Prayer is both solitary and communal. The more people are praying for something, the more powerful it feels. We ask for our “prayer warriors” (a term I have never particularly cared for) to engage for us. Prayer is for nighttime, a ritual before sleep. At times, prayer feels utterly useless and/or the only thing we can do that is useful.
To wit, I have a lot of baked-in conceptions about prayer, and not all of those recipes are worth keeping.
In this particular moment, prayer was a therapy session. I was feeling a lot of things and needed to get them out there. And while God wasn’t sitting across from me, taking notes and suggesting we unpack that, the implication was there anyway.
I believe that we are not responsible for our first thought or gut reaction, but we are responsible for our second thought and our response to reaction.
My first reaction, which I posted in the aforementioned group text, was “Fuck Charlie Kirk and fuck the fallout that’s going to result from this.”
My second reaction, which I did not post in the chat, was “I do not want to feel this way about a person who died extremely violently and publicly, even though I find everything he did in his short, public life reprehensible.”
And as I started to unpack this further, I came to the core of my initial reaction: Charlie Kirk and I both profess belief in the same God and claim to be followers of Jesus Christ. We are both saved by grace that is completely unearned — nothing we say or do while we’re alive makes us worthy of that grace, neither does it make us exempt. And it is this profound unfairness that I wrestle with constantly.
I have not and cannot do anything to earn God’s grace. You have not and cannot do anything to earn God’s grace. Charlie Kirk has not and cannot do anything to earn God’s grace. Donald Trump has not and cannot do anything to earn God’s grace. Fred Rogers did not and could not do anything to earn God’s grace. My fifth-grade bus driver who drove all the way back to my house at the end of her route to drop off my violin that I left on my seat has not and cannot do anything to earn God’s grace.
Yet we have it anyway.
The thing is, grace is equal but not equitable, which totally goes against how I want things to be in the world. I think about this image a lot:
When everyone gets the same thing, it’s more than enough for some and still not enough for others. When everyone gets what they need, everyone has enough.
But that’s not how grace works. And maybe that’s a good thing.
After all, it’s not like I’m the one arbitrating who gets grace and how much. And, y’know, thank God for that. But I can still get burned up over the fact that someone who actively did and said terrible things, who made it his life’s mission to make life worse for people deemed beneath him, has as much grace from God as I do, and that we may even share the same eternal afterlife.
It’s surreal and it’s infuriating and ultimately, it’s not my business.
How Charlie Kirk chose to use his time on earth, what was truly in his heart, and whether or not he got into heaven has nothing to do with me.
Well, perhaps except for the first part. Some of his very last words included condemning transgender mass shooters, of which there are “too many” according to him (there have been two documented transgender mass shooters since 1966 and the vast majority of perpetrators are cisgender white men), and as a non-binary person married to a transgender woman helplessly observing the alarming rate that transphobia has risen in our culture and legislation, that very much has something to do with me.
But that’s the other important thing about God’s grace: it’s God’s. Not mine.
That’s not to say I don’t have grace to give. I do. I have grace for Charlie Kirk’s children, who will now grow up without a father and will learn in all sorts of ways from all sorts of people just what kind of legacy he left. I have grace for Erika Kirk, whom I know nothing about except that she was married to Charlie Kirk (with all the inference that carries) and now has to navigate not just life without her husband, but all that comes with having him killed so publicly. I have grace for the students at UVU who attended the rally and witnessed the horror, as well as the people online who saw the video I saw and did not seek it out. And, yeah, I have grace for the shooter, whatever their intentions were.
I have grace for those people and pray that their hearts may be changed for the better. It’s the prayer I have for myself, too.
So, Charlie Kirk goes to heaven or maybe he doesn’t. In the meantime, the rest of us are still here and must live with the fallout. I can apologize to God for saying “fuck Charlie Kirk” and want better for myself, but I won’t apologize for cursing what will ensue.
Part of that will be the continued swell of transphobia I already mentioned. In addition to that, major media outlets have spent the last 24 hours clamoring to get out the best hagiographical eulogy they can (my personal favorite is the one from The Atlantic comparing Kirk to Malcolm X and MLK Jr., yet again affirming my subscription cancellation last year) in an attempt to whitewash his actual words, actions, and impact. We are being reminded from politicians across the aisle that “political violence has no place in this country” as if this very country wasn’t founded on exactly that, while also tumbling through the tidal waves of admonishment from the hot-take machines regarding how people are or aren’t reacting to the news.
You may be told that Charlie Kirk was a complicated person. I don’t think he was. Everything he believed, or said he believed, is out there for people to read or watch and decide for themselves, and the ramifications will be felt for a long time. He did not start the current culture wars, but he played his part in stoking them with aplomb. His fervor for the 2nd Amendment culminated in choking on the very fruits of that labor. Just desserts? Small potatoes? Some other food-based cliche? Bon appetit.
After a certain point, I’d had enough of my own ranting and raving about the state of the world and my own tangled-yet-disjointed feelings about Charlie Kirk, his death, and his final destination. I had asked for a lot: for my own heart to change, for the hearts of others to change, for protection, for clarity, for healing…mostly for what I knew I was absolutely never going to get, which is an explanation for why things are the way they are right now. Why we humans are hell-bent on self-destruction. Why I’m expected to come to work every day and answer my little emails and check off my little task list when the world is on fire. Why there was yet another mass shooting in neighboring Colorado at the same time. Why it feels like God either can’t or won’t directly intervene.
It’s that last question that’s the real kicker. I completely understand why people are atheists. I do not always understand why I am not.
I can’t answer these questions on my own and I’m not about to get the answers from anyone else. So I turned to gratitude instead.
Thank You for what is still good in the world: sunshine, rain, YMCA swim centers, steady income. Friends who are kind, funny, smart and generous. A wife who is all of those things and so much more, who exists wholly and authentically with joyous defiance, whose love I am privileged beyond words to experience. Upcoming vacation time. Highly anticipated comedy shows and concerts. Books. Books. BOOKS. For the Chipotle employees who pack my burrito bowls fit to bursting. Reliable transportation. Health. Housing. A servant’s heart.
For Spirit-filled people doing the work that Christ mandated, loving God and serving their neighbor without exception. For different-faith-filled people doing that same work because what unites us beyond our respective creeds is our desire to see every person cared for. For non-believers doing that same work because it’s just the fucking right thing to do and don’t need a book or a prophet or a deity to tell them so.
Saying my thank-yous got me all the way to the swim center, where I sat in the parking lot and caught up yet again with the text chain, live updates on news sites, Reddit threads, etc. Charlie Kirk’s death confirmed. The memes are flying. The emotions continue to cast a wide range, from grim satisfaction to righteous anger. The machine churns on.
I put my phone away, grab my gym bag, and head inside. I scan my membership tag, shower, and get in the pool. For the next hour, there is only the steady rhythm of my laps, the happy shrieks of children playing the loudest game of Marco Polo I’ve ever heard, and exorcising the demons of the day; every arm and leg movement proof beyond reproach that despite everything, there is still strength enough to face the next thing. Faith bruised but intact. Hope sputtering but not completely extinguished. We are still here and there is still time.
Ash Hillary 