How many times have you heard the words “it’s always darkest before the dawn”?  As someone who has struggled with depression, I have heard some variant of that phrase uttered by the most well-intentioned people as a way of entreating me to “keep my chin up”.  I find it fascinating that people have never stopped to consider fully what those words mean.  If the phrase had used the word “dark” instead of “darkest”, there would have been a universality to the statement that was not only true but easier to deal with.  But the choice of the word “darkest” is key.

I once heard someone describe depression as being at the bottom of a deep well.  No one can hear you, no one is able to see you.  The light from the sun is so distant that it might as well be inconsequential.  The darkness has a physical presence that surrounds you, cutting you off from hope to the point that, at the most extreme, death seems like a better alternative.

That is why the word “darkest” is so important to acknowledge.  If you haven’t experience depression you can easily understand dark—at its core it’s simply the absence of light.  But to a depressive, there is a gradation to “dark” where dark can lead to darker which can lead to darkest.  The problem is while the dawn may be coming inevitably, it’s not so clear when the state of “darkest” has been achieved.  When has the bottom of the well been reached?

This notion of dark and darkest pervades the Judeo-Christian tradition.  The man Job must surely have wondered with each affliction, if he had attained “darkest”.  The Egyptians suffering under the plagues must have questioned if losing their first-born son was the darkest moment or whether something else was coming.  And I am sure that Jesus, as he was facing certain death, must have wondered when the darkest moment would happen—would it be when he was abandoned in the garden, when he was flogged, when he was nailed to the cross or when he struggled to catch his last breath.  I am certain that each moment felt darker than the last.   That’s the issue, it is hard to know when the darkest moment has come to provide a sense of certain relief from the impending dawn.

Today we sit trying to comprehend 59 deaths in Las Vegas.  Have we as a nation attained the darkest moment?  With each massacre being the deadliest one in history as the number of casualties per event grows, it feels like we may be getting close.  But without being pessimistic I believe it is safe to say that we haven’t had our darkest moment.  It is inevitable that things are going to get worse.

There is one simple reason for this conclusion. Our country is more divided than ever before.  This divisiveness is fueled by despair (even hate) over the seeming ignorance of the other side.  Both sides are equally to blame—liberals scoff at the gullibility, conservatives scoff at the sense of entitlement.  Our everyday conversations, regardless of how “politically correct” or socially polite still point to a world of us versus them.  And the more that that occurs, the less human each of us becomes.  It is much easier to dismiss a thing that it flawed than it is a person, but we are turning people into things based solely on their place on the political spectrum.  Even the most recent massacre is quickly becoming less about the individual lives lost and more about who is going to say what and what extreme faction can be blamed.

Even the notion of should we, or are we, politicizing the loss of lives shows our ability to separate people from life, and move us further away from one another.  We can’t even agree on how to grieve as a nation without worrying how it defines us and into which camp it places us.

Let me be clear.  We should be politicizing the deaths in Las Vegas.  I am not advocating using death as a way of pushing forward a unilateral Washington DC platform. Lives were lost–how can we not politicize something for which we are to blame and something which was completely avoidable?  We need to reaffirm the value of each individual life and make the protection of that life a political issue.

It is impossible to read the New Testament without understanding that the Christian movement was also political—but again not in a power politics way.  Christianity showed the value of each life by highlighting the potential for each life to be fully realized when blessed with love and grace.  This was a revolutionary idea in a world that was, for better or for worse, a caste-like society.  The notion of the Jews as the chosen race had been bastardized to a point of “us versus them”.  The Roman government t had its own “us versus them” establishment as the ruling class of a conquered nation.  Everywhere one turned, there was a different class of outcast that was easy to hate.  Jesus upended that by offering love and healing unconditionally.

We are turning back to a society defined by grouping “outcasts”.  There are people who continue to trust traditional news sources for truth based information and they shun the people who have decried these outlets as being fake news.  The people who have grown distrustful of the media due to concerns about one-sided reporting scoff at those who they think have merely given into the establishment.  We aren’t interested in dialogue, we are interested in making the other side realize how stupidly they are acting.

But turning people into the “other” robs them of their humanity.  It allows us to place people into buckets and assign worth to them.  We utter the phrase “there but for the grace of God go I” to make it clear as to which side of the tracks we are from.  It makes it easy to dismiss them and more importantly their suffering and pain.  We can get up in arms when someone attacks our tribe and then emotionally distance ourselves from the impact of an attack on another tribe.

This must change.  If we don’t start focusing on what unites us instead of what divides us, the darkness will only continue to get darker.  Dawn will only come when we acknowledge that we are all individuals worthy of love, consideration and respect.  We need to figure out ways to make that kind of love, consideration and respect universal to all.  Love is the light that can finally cast out the darkest dark.  Are we willing to be harbingers of light or are we content to wallow in darkness of our own making?