A Reflection for the Greater Milwaukee Sikh Community at the Tenth Anniversary of the Oak Creek Temple Shooting
https://youtu.be/I7yK5dxSHPg?t=1809
I am a Christian priest in the Episcopal Church, but I come before you today as the Chair of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, an organization that represents over twenty different faith traditions in the Greater Milwaukee area. Our membership includes communities from multiple strains of the Sikh, Islamic, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Bahai, Hindu and other traditions. While we have many differences, we find a commonality in the belief in the inherent dignity of every human being. It is from that touchpoint that I speak today.
The first passage of the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib, reads in translation, “First, God Created light, all humanity has been Created by the same Divine; all have been Created out of the same light, how could one be good and another bad?” The teachings of the Gurus from Guru Nanak until the appointment of the scriptures as the eternal Guru for Sikhs point clearly and inexorably to this understanding for Sikhism’s adherents — that God permeates us all, and we are all part of the one divine.
Other world religions articulate the divine/human relationship differently, but with a similar end. The Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton wrote about his epiphany in Louisville in 1968, “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” His insight was that it was “Only a dream of separateness” that kept us apart.
The illusion of separateness is a sinful luxury — one that is rightfully challenged in times of grief, when we are given a choice as to whether we continue to cling tighter to that illusion, or allow it to shatter and see the essential oneness that binds us all.
We, your siblings and friends, recognize the mixed nature of Sikh experience in America. You have found great opportunity, but have also experienced much hardship and discrimination.
Ten years ago, when this temple was assaulted and your community lost so many of its members, you could have turned inward, but you did not. You stayed true to the teachings of your Gurus. You could have closed your doors in fear. Instead, you courageously opened them for Langar and people flooded in to demonstrate solidarity. The Sikh community of Greater Milwaukee has shown us again and again what a belief in our essential human oneness looks like, and that witness has led to a general strengthening of ties among our interfaith community. Thank you for your gift to us. Your strength in your grief has strengthened all of us in hope.
And what is our hope? That we are at the turning of the tide. Theodore Parker wrote and Martin Luther King Jr. quoted that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. Those of us who are people of faith, who accept our oneness in a loving creator, who believe in the inherent dignity of every human being, have to recommit ourselves to a shared vision for a just, equal world based in non-violence where mass shootings are not the norm. We long for and commit ourselves to a nation where, as George Washington wrote to the Jewish Congregation of Newport, “they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”
Tonight and throughout this weekend, your siblings from other faiths sit with you in remembrance so that we may continue to stand with you in hope and work for justice in the days ahead.
