A week later, I’m still mentally reeling a little in the wake of the murder of Waltham High student Tyler Zanco last week. I didn’t know him or his family, but something about the murder of a teenager-a child, really-feels like it demands our attention. My son Isaiah turns seven on Saturday-where will he be when he’s 17?
In my sermon on Sunday I was thinking with you about the murder of Jorge Fuentes, a parishioner at St Stephen’s in the South End, who came up through the ranks of the B-Ready afterschool program and the B-Safe summer camp program we volunteer with. It was in response to his death that our diocese kicked off the “B Peace” program to work against violence in Boston. Last year we participated in the Mother’s Day Walk for Peace, which we’ll join again this year. The Mother’s Day Walk, too, was founded in memory of a child who died-Louis Brown, whose mother started the Peace Institute in his memory. Louis Brown Peace Institute has partnered with the Harvard School of Public Health in their Peace Zone Curriculum for middle and high school youth They hold the Walk as an annual fundraiser for their work in in peace education and support for survivors of violence. In our diocese, along with support of the walk, the other aspects of the B Peace program are summer jobs for youth and anti-gun work, which has particular resonance with the news coming out this week about one of the alleged perpetrators of last week’s murder.
In this whole bundle of complication and grief, it’s hard to know how to respond. Whatever the circumstances, wherever it happens, it’s still tragic. Spiritually, it feels like it comes back to that question the lawyer asks Jesus when he’s trying to test him-“Who is my neighbor?” We all know how that ends-we become neighbors when we are in community with each other, when we help, when we provide for each others’ needs. Neighborliness isn’t about being part of the same group-on an ordinary day, the traveler in the story and the Samaritan wouldn’t have had anything to do with each other at all-they both would have wanted it that way! We aren’t just neighbors because we are, literally, near ones. Tyler, Jorge, the families who come for diapers, or food, those who wait for the bus outside-these are all “near ones,” but how can we actually become neighbors?
That’s the invitation of the Gospel. I don’t immediately know the answer to how we live into the call to be neighbors-it’s always different. Events like the Mother’s Day walk appeal to me as a way to act-like “Ashes to Go,” for me they fall into the “make the right mistakes” column-it may not fix everything, but it is something. We still need to do more to support our teenagers and make our neighborhoods safe. We still need to do more to get outside of our four walls and share our faith. But we can do this.