It’s a heavy day. I’m impacted by the violence going on in my country (although you don’t have to be). It’s scary, and I’m left helpless in it. I saw the videos. I think it’s important to watch them. To be witness to it. Although I don’t recommend it.

I’m thrown by Charlie Kirk’s death for more reasons than one, too. Not because I agreed with everything he said, but because if you speak out, like I often do in this newsletter, in my writing, you might lose your life. That remains a reality even in 2025.

We need healing

The sudden and unjust deaths like the ones of the last week, to both Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, have left me sober and pensive. Immediately upon the news of the death of Charlie Kirk yesterday the internet was roaring. There’s plenty of commentary and not a clear path forward. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it surely won’t be the last. What do you do when you live in a world with evil?

We have the potential for this place, this place we live, to be heaven on earth. Not in a biblical sense either. Just in that there’s a world we can live in that is good and fair and just. That is loving and caring. Where needs are met and wants don’t hurt anyone. Where there is more good than bad in the world, between each other.

It’s not a political thing. It’s not a mental health thing. It’s a spiritual one.

The senseless violence, the kind that we just saw over the last week, is a sickness of the spirit.

We’re at a spiritual deficit in this country. Random acts of violence, senseless acts of violence don’t happen when you’re connected to something deeper. When you’re values-led. When we have tools for healing that are open and free. And when people have the internal will and drive and fire inside to live good lives.

Throughout human history, no civilization has existed without some form of religion or spirituality. Until, about right about now. I’m not saying secularism is what’s creating senseless acts of violence, but I do believe it’s a marker of deep wounding.

I don’t think anyone would argue with me that America is a largely secular society. Although that’s changing among Gen Z. In 2024, the Pew Research Center found 28% of Americans had ‘none’ as their spiritual or religious choice. For a long time, I was one of these nones. In 2022, Gallup posted that Americans’ belief in a God was down to 81%. And less than half of Americans are members of a church. Belief, behavior, and belonging are all at an all-time low in American society.

But here’s the thing: every other time in history when people tried to have societies without the sacred, it never actually worked. The Soviet Union bulldozed churches and executed priests for seventy years, yet the Orthodox Church resurfaced the moment the regime fell. In Albania, religion was banned outright (they declared themselves the world’s first atheist state) and still, faith went underground, only to re-emerge decades later. Even in Mao’s China, where temples were smashed and scriptures burned, people whispered prayers, tended ancestral altars, and kept folk rituals alive. Wherever humans go, spirit finds a way back in. There is something deeply human about living with God at the center.

Public ministry

Charlie Kirk was a public minister. He was doing public ministry. Yes, he was doing aggressive political debate on college campuses, but he was faith-led first. I can respect that. It is courageous to speak out spiritually; it is courageous to talk about God.

You can say your political beliefs easily. You can vote, and you can repost the news and whatever you want, typically, without recourse. But to speak about God? You’ve joined the list of thousands of people who have been persecuted for speaking about what’s in their heart. Religious persecution is a deep, ancestral wound.

And it doesn’t matter if he’s right or not. He’s holding some version of truth. No one alive holds it all.

I was challenged in my own beliefs by his courage to speak his. I was able to sharpen my knife because he was sharpening his. Courage breeds courage. Respect breeds respect. Whit breeds whit.

And the thing is, we need more people speaking out about how we can live our lives, think differently, be different, see different, not less.

So when violence erupts, it isn’t enough to blame politics, policy failures, or psychology alone. Those matter, but they don’t reach the root.

When someone lifts a weapon and turns it on another human being, what we’re witnessing isn’t just a failure of law or a glitch in psychology. It’s the collapse of the soul’s memory. It’s what happens when a person becomes so severed from the source, from their own heart, that they can no longer recognize the divine spark in another. Evil is not simply the absence of good policy or better systems. Evil is forgetfulness. Evil is the loss of the sense that life is holy.

And if violence is born of that forgetting, then no election, no headline, no clever argument will ever be enough to heal it. What’s required is a different kind of restoration, one that pulls us back into relationship with God, with each other, with the living web of being. Until we remember that we are not separate, until we feel the sacred thread running through every pair of eyes we meet, we will keep reenacting the same cycles of harm. The question isn’t really why did this happen? The deeper question is: what part of us still believes destruction is the only language we have and are we brave enough to let love, that brighter fire, rewrite the story?

All I can offer

If you’re impacted like I am today, maybe this will help:

Prayer

Great Spirit of all life,
turn our faces back toward You.
Where we have forgotten our source, remind us.
Where hatred has grown, plant compassion.
Where fear has hardened hearts, break us open to love.
Make us remember that every breath is shared,
that every life is Yours,
that in harming one another we wound our own souls.
May we have the courage to choose life again.
And be taught by the teachings of these events.
May we learn what we need,
and move forward in Grace.
Amen.

Application

How can I give, serve and pray for those who are victims of violence?

Love,
Val

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