Fields stretched on all sides as we made our way from the Milwaukee airport to the gurdwara. Oak Creek lies on the southern edge of Milwaukee County. It’s a predominantly white suburb with a population of 30,000. In the late 1990s, local Sikh families established “The Sikh Temple of Wisconsin” here. They were immigrants from India who worked as taxi drivers and gas station attendants and built small businesses to pursue their dreams, as had countless immigrants before them. Sikh families gathered in rented halls until they could build their own gurdwara, a brick building set back from the main road on South Howell Avenue. Like all gurdwaras, it was not only a house of worship but also a community center bustling with activity each day – families prayed together and cooked together and argued together and counseled each other, children played in the hallways as the elderly scolded them, couples met and got married, new babies were blessed. The gurdwara was where life happened. 

That Sunday morning, August 5th, there were about thirty to forty people inside the gurdwara preparing for the day’s services. It was 10am. Aunties were in the kitchen, cooking langar to feed the few hundred people who would soon arrive. They were bringing chai to a boil, stirring enormous steel pots of dahl and tossing rotis between their hands, letting the rotis puff up gol gol on the stove before piling them on a tray. In the living quarters at the other end of the gurdwara, the granthis and ragis were chatting and tying their turbans. They were people trained in India who lived and served in the gurdwara for months or years at a time to lead ceremonies, recite scriptures, and sing kirtan during the services. In the diwan hall, the main prayer hall, a few early risers had come for quiet meditation. Children played throughout the gurdwara before their Sunday school classes began.

Two children, Amanat Singh and her little brother Abhay, were sitting out in front of the gurdwara, giggling and singing, when they saw a white man pull up in a red pick-up truck. They watched the man approach two granthis who were talking to one another in the parking lot – Ranjit and Sita Singh, both brothers, forty-nine and forty-one. Their wives and children in India had been apart from them for sixteen years while they sent money home, waiting to be reunited. In the meantime, they performed religious services at the gurdwara each day. The brothers turned to the man. He was probably lost and needed directions. Maybe he would come inside for cha tea. The children then saw a gun and heard an explosion of popping sounds. Smoke drifted above Ranjit Ji’s turban. Ranjit Ji staggered towards the gunman, then fell onto the pavement. His brother Sita Ji fell on top of him, bleeding.  

Narinder Kaur witnessed the killings from her parked car. She managed to drive out of the parking lot, hands shaking, and made the first 911 call. The children Amanat and Abhay ran inside the gurdwara and cried, “Someone killed the Baba Ji!” Everyone began to run. They rushed into closets, hid behind doors, and ran down to the basement. From the street, Narinder Auntie called her friend inside the gurdwara, who answered in a whisper, “Someone save us!” The gunman was now inside.

Wade Michael Page, armed with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, was stalking the building. He saw a woman behind a large column in the main foyer and fired, grazing her with a bullet. Amarjit Auntie ran down the hallway into the kitchen, where other women pulled her into the pantry and tended to her wounds with napkins. The pantry was small and dark and hot, sixteen women and children crammed inside, clutching each other as they heard more gunshots.

Page stepped into the diwan hall, the main prayer hall, and found Paramjit Kaur, a forty-one year old mother of two sons. She served the gurdwara nearly every day of the week. He shot her in front of the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred scripture. She died where she fell; her blood soaked the carpet. He then proceeded down the hallway toward the kitchen where he had seen Amarjit Auntie disappear. 

In the meantime, the aunties in the pantry had smelled something burning. Pammi Kaur and her friend snuck out to turn off the burners on the opposite side of the kitchen. Just then, Pammi Auntie turned to see Page on the other side of the counter that separated the kitchen from the langar hall. He was staring at her. He had no expression on his face. He lifted his gun and began firing. Bullets flew and grazed both of them before they dove back into the pantry. Page must have thought that the pantry door led outside. Had he pursued them, all sixteen women and children in the pantry would have been dead.

Page returned down the hallway back into the main foyer when he saw an elderly man coming out of the library. Suveg Singh Khattra, an eighty-four year old grandfather, had come to live in Oak Creek with his son after retiring from his life as a farmer in Punjab. His son would drop him off at the gurdwara nearly every morning and pick him up at night. He would spend the day praying and playing hide-and-seek with the children. Page shot him in the head. His daughter-in-law Kulwant Kaur was one of the women hiding in the pantry and later found him there on the ground, his turban knocked to the side. Page continued down the hallway toward the living quarters on the far side of the building. 

Baba Punjab Singh had been tying his turban in one of the bedrooms. He was a renowned Sikh teacher, a man of many words who traveled the world to speak and teach in gurdwaras for months at a time, splitting his time between Wisconsin, California, New Jersey, and India. His sons and grandchildren loved him as much as the thousands who flocked to listen to him. Page forced down the door and shot him in the face. The bullet entered his jaw and permanently damaged his spinal cord. He would survive – but he would never speak or move again. 

Page crossed the hallway to the other bedroom, where three more granthis were hiding along with Satwant Singh Kaleka, the president of the gurdwara. They were getting ready that morning when they heard gunshots and called 911. One of them Gurmail Singh hid in the bathroom and heard what happened next. Page entered the room. Prakash Singh was the first to be killed, shot in the head through the eye. He was a thirty-nine year old father who had just moved his family from India to serve the gurdwara. His wife and children were hiding in the basement.

Santokh Singh, one of the granthis, faced Page and said, “What is your problem? Why are you doing this?” Page lifted his gun and shot him twice in the stomach. Page pulled the trigger to shoot again but the gun did not fire. He stopped to reload. Clutching his belly, Santokh Uncle pushed through the door and ran down the hallway and outside while Page tried to follow him. He was running and bleeding and breathing “Waheguru, Waheguru” He staggered to a nearby house and collapsed on the front lawn where the neighbor called 911. He would survive. 

Meanwhile, Satwant Uncle made a final 911 call. Page then returned to the room and killed him. Police found a butter knife near Satwant Uncle’s body. The FBI told his sons Pardeep and Amardeep that they believed he had died while trying to fight the gunman. 

At 10:28am, Lt. Brian Murphy arrived on the scene. Lt. Murphy, a former marine, who had served in the Oak Creek police force for twenty years, was not supposed to work that day. He had traded days off with another officer. As he pulled down the driveway, he turned off his lights and sirens. Brian saw the bodies of the brothers in the parking lot, one on top of the other, and called for an ambulance. Sita Ji’s eyes were open and fixed. He knew they were dead. That’s when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye. Page had emerged from the gurdwara.

“Police! Stop!” yelled Brian. Both men raised their guns at the same time and pulled the trigger. Brian missed. Page did not. The bullet hit Brian in the chin, tore through his voice box and larynx and lodged in his trapezius. Brian dove behind a car for cover as bullets flew around him. There was a lull. Brian crawled out to look for him but he wasn’t there. Page suddenly appeared behind him and opened fire less than fifteen feet away. The next bullet tore off half of Brian’s left thumb and knocked the gun from his hand. Page shot him again in the thigh and upper arm. “Better get small,” thought Brian. He flipped over and crawled under the car as more bullets hit the back of his vest. 

As he lie there under the car, losing blood, everything started to get quiet and heavy and warm. “Cozy,” Brian described it. He started to close his eyes. He was losing consciousness. He was about to give into the pull down into sleep when he thought of his wife and children. He wasn’t going to die in this parking lot. He willed himself awake.

There was a lull as Page reloaded his gun. Drawing up the last energy he had, Brian began to crawl across the pavement to his car to retrieve his shotgun. But Page fired again, hitting the back of his arm and leg. At this point, Brian made eye contact. There was nothing in Page’s face. “Not hate. Not anger. Not emotion,” he said. A final round pumped a bullet in the back of Brian’s head.

Sirens. Officer Sam Lenda arrived on the scene. Page shot a bullet that shattered the windshield of his police car. Lenda fired back six times. Wounded, Page dropped to the ground and crawled a few feet before shooting himself in the head. It was over.

Exhale.

When the gunshots died down, everyone hiding in the gurdwara began to stir. The two children who had huddled in the basement, Palmeet and Prabhjot, climbed the stairs. Their father had told them to run into the basement to hide and then disappeared to warn others. Now the children were looking for him. They walked past dead bodies and went from room to room until they found their father on the floor of one of the bedrooms. They shook Prakash Singh’s body and begged him to wake up. Palmeet touched her father’s face around his missing eye. There was blood on her hand. The children hid in the bathroom for another hour until police entered the building and led everyone out. The police asked everyone put their hands behind their heads as they left the gurdwara. Kulwant Kaur saw her father-in-law’s body in the foyer and started to rush to him, but the police told her to keep her hands up. 

Outside in the parking lot, Brian felt officers lift him up and rush him to the hospital. He could hear stress in their voices. He was their boss. He thought, “Calm it down. Autogenic breathing.” Breathe in for four counts, hold for four counts, and out for four counts. It lowers heart rate, calms the nervous system. But he couldn’t speak to remind them. He had twelve bullets in his body. 

As ambulances rushed people to the hospital, the parking lot filled with police cars, FBI agents, media trucks, and family members looking for their loved ones. Kamal and Harpreet, twenty and eighteen, were searching for their mother. Every road was blocked. Kamal fought his way to get through with a picture of his mother on his phone. “Have you seen her?” he kept asking. The brothers spent all day searching for her from hospital to hospital. Kamal returned at night to the bowling alley across the street from the gurdwara. Classic Lanes had been transformed into a temporary morgue, interviewing location, and family assistance center. “Do you want to tell him or do you want me to?” an agent asked his father. Everything went dark for a few minutes. Kamal went home to tell his brother, “Mom’s not coming home because she’s looking over us from above.” 

“I’ve only had one dream about her,” Kamal told me. “I told her I was hungry and she made me saag. If I could have her back just one day, I would eat the food she made for me, food from her hands.”

We were sitting together in their mother’s bedroom. The shooting had happened a few days ago. Both sons were tired and grief-stricken but they knew it was better not to be alone. Thousands of people had showed up on Tuesday night for a vigil for their mother and the others who were killed. They wanted to keep being with people. 

“We heard from the medical examiner that she died a painful death,” Kamal said. “I know the last thing that probably went through her mind was, ‘Mera Preet di ki hoya?’ What will become of my Harpreet? She loved him. I know she believes that I’m here for him.”

Kamal was the older, independent brother. Harpreet was the shy younger one, the one who never left his mother’s side. She was his best friend. “I was bullied through my childhood,” Harpreet said quietly, “but I never thought that this would happen to my mother.” She had tried to wake them up in the morning to go to gurdwara with her that day, but they turned over and went back to sleep. “If only we had gone with her…” they kept saying. 

Their father was an alcoholic and had a history of beating their mother. The boys always threw their bodies between them to protect her. They thought he might kill her one day. But she died a different way – at the hands of another man. Now they felt like orphans. 

Every weekend, their mother used to make them their favorite food gobi wale pratha. The brothers found the parathas their mother had prepared for them in the fridge. They sat together and ate her food together for the last time. They would move out of the house a few weeks later.

Suddenly there was a buzz of movement in the rest of the home. Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker entered the tiny living room of Kamal and Harpreet’s house with an entourage of men in black suits.

Inhale.

Governor Walker took a seat and wore a solemn expression as family and neighbors gathered around and the boys described their mother. “Why did he have a gun?” their father moaned. The Governor agreed that guns should not be in the hands of deranged people. He then said, “We offer not only our condolences but also our love.” He quoted Dr. King, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that.” I quietly thought: King also said that love was not emotional bosh but was sustained committed action. The grieving people in the room pressed him on what he would do to prevent another Oak Creek. He didn’t have a good answer. In the days to come, elected leaders like Governor Walker and Senator Paul Ryan and other lawmakers would show up to offer condolences that week with words like “love” on their lips – and go on to do nothing to secure gun safety laws or curb hate crimes or combat white nationalism in America. Instead, they would back policies and rhetoric that fueled the climate of hate, racism, and xenophobia that had radicalized the gunman in the first place; their silence would become even more deadly in the Trump era. 

Sitting there in that cramped living room, watching the Governor nod politely as community members desperately sought his help, knowing that he would do nothing, my fists clenched. I felt rage rise within me. It was not rage against the gunman: It was rage against the conditions that produced him. A culture of hate and lawmakers who paid lip service but did nothing to stop it. I witnessed the rage in me and honored the rage. And then I took the next breath. 

Exhale.

On Thursday, August 9th – just four days after the shooting – the FBI handed the Oak Creek gurdwara back to the community. The FBI typically cleans crimes scenes, but the Sikh community insisted on doing this labor themselves. Media were not allowed inside but family members had asked us to be there to document it. 

When Sharat and I walked in the gurdwara, there was blood in the carpets and bullet holes in the walls. It was a site of massacre. Sacred places are extensions of our bodies. When we step inside them, their familiarity – their smells and colors and sounds – shows up as felt-sense in our bodies. It is the feeling of ease and safety and belonging. If we cannot feel at home anywhere else, we can be home here, even if just for a Sunday morning. When a sacred place is ravaged, the dissonance is equally powerful. As my eyes darted around to each smudge of blood, my body constricted, and nausea overcame me. Here is your home back, full of death.

Then more people arrived and prayers sounded softly over the loudspeakers. I watched the same aunties and uncles who had survived the shooting roll up their sleeves and get to work. With their own hands, they ripped out the blood-soaked carpets. They painted over the bullet holes in the walls, scrubbed the floors, drilled in new doors, and repaired shattered windows. Over the next few hours, I watched the community literally rebuild itself before my eyes, reciting and breathing “Waheguru, Waheguru” as they worked. They were restoring the gurdwara, and they were restoring themselves. By mid-day, they were already cooking langar and serving hot food on long red and blue rugs in the langar hall. 

“I’m not scared,” Pammi Auntie told me. She was the auntie who had rushed out to turn off the burners. “I will not be stopped from doing seva.” I will not be stopped from serving.

Inhale.

That night, the Department of Justice organized a town hall meeting. One by one, nearly every Sikh who took the open mic told the panel of officials on stage that the shooting was not an isolated incident but one in a long pattern of hate crimes since 9/11 and long before. Our children are bullied and our people profiled at airports, barred from military service, and subject to racial slurs and hate crimes that are not specifically tracked by the government, they said. Just three days after the shooting, a Sikh cab driver in Oak Creek reported that a white man asked him to roll down the window, pantomimed shooting a gun and said, “This isn’t over.” I was reminded how Rana Sodhi was shown a knife at a stop light shortly after his brother was killed immediately after 9/11. These were the same stories, on repeat, for a decade.

One person asked, “A picture is worth a thousand words. Can President Obama please come and take a picture with us to show the country that we are Americans too?” We were begging for… a picture. The officials listened and nodded politely. 

The Obama administration would implement a strong and swift response to the Oak Creek shooting. The FBI and Department of Justice investigated the attack as both an act of domestic terrorism and a hate crime. Flags flew at half-mast for us. But our community longed for more. We longed for the deeper spiritual and emotional assurance that they were welcome in a nation that had produced the gunman, the kind of assurance that could have been provided by a presidential visit. Or at least a photograph. A few weeks earlier, President Obama suspended a day of campaigning and flew to Colorado in the wake of a horrific mass shooting in a movie theater in Aurora. He mourned publicly with the families before they buried their dead. He told them that he hugged his daughters closer that night, imagining them in the theater. In his condolences after Oak Creek, the President referred to Sikhs as members of the “broader American family” as if we were some distant relatives. Obama did not come to Oak Creek. In the President’s stead, Attorney General Eric Holder arrived to attend the memorial. Community members were quietly disappointed. I had conflicted feelings: He should have showed up for us. It was the right thing to do. But it was also difficult to level any criticism against a President who held up a vision of an America that at least included us. Obama had been maligned during his entire political career, accused of being a Muslim as if that somehow made him less American. How do we hold an individual accountable when we know they are being unfairly attacked by the same oppressive forces we are seeking to transform? I bit my tongue. In a few years, I would come to find out just how lucky we were to have a sitting President and an administration that cared about us at all, or even wanted us to exist.

Exhale.

The memorial service was held on Friday, August 10^th in the gym of Oak Creek High School. As people lined up outside, Sharat and I met the families behind the building and watched them carry casket after casket out of black hearses, chanting “Waheguru, Waheguru.” They lined the caskets in front of the gym. 

We had debated whether the caskets should be open or closed. I said open. But I wasn’t prepared to for the moment they pulled down the white sheets – there were the faces of five uncles and one auntie, stoic, regal, unmoving. Next to each casket stood their family members. Satpal Kaur Kaleka threw herself over her husband’s body and wept as the other women held her. Kamal and Harpreet stood next to their mother’s body, hands clasped, trying to stand tall. Then the doors opened and people began to pour in. So many people that I was in awe. They sat on the floor of the gym and in the bleachers – a sea of turbans and chunnis, brown faces and white faces. Police officers sat together in uniform. Three thousand people in all.

“In the recent past, too many Sikhs have been targeted and victimized simply because of who they are, how they look, and what they believe,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “This is wrong. It is unacceptable. And it will not be tolerated.” He then echoed President Obama’s words: “It is that fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, that makes this country work.” He called the tragedy an act of domestic terrorism. This was significant. Since 9/11, the Justice Department routinely declined to label white far-right extremists “terrorists” even when their crimes meet the legal definition of terrorism: ideologically motivated acts that are harmful to human life and intended to intimidate civilians, influence policy, or change government conduct. It’s as though the government reserved that label only for those for whom it wants to conjure the threat of collective peril: When the perpetrator is Muslim, he is called a terrorist. When he is white, he is called a lone wolf. The label signifies whose security is a priority. By calling the shooting an act of terrorism, Holder was making an official statement about the severity of the crime – and the government’s commitment to protect us. “We will discuss how to change our laws and hearts in the coming days,” he said. After he was done, Sikhs called out “Bole So Nihal” and thousands responded, “Satsriakal! May it be so!” 

After the officials finished, the children of the dead spoke and brought the audience to tears. “I couldn’t speak in front of twelve kids in speech class,” Kamal whispered to me afterward, “but I just spoke to thousands and my voice didn’t shake. It was my mother’s spirit.”

Then people lined up to pay their respects to each of the dead. A group of police officers wept as they approached the caskets, a priest walked by each one silently making the sign of the cross, an indigenous leader left a dream catcher. Then it was my turn, and I touched the foot of each casket and said “Waheguru.” It was difficult to breathe as I looked into the face of each person, lifeless. They looked like my family. On the way back to my seat, I saw a familiar face – Amardeep Singh Bhalla, the Program Director of the Sikh Coalition. Amar had been on the ground all week working alongside other advocates, including Sapreet Kaur who ran the Sikh Coalition, Jasjit Singh who directed the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund (SALDEF), Deepa Iyer who led South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), and Puni Kalra and her team of mental health professionals. We were all colleagues. I worked with them as the director of Groundswell, coordinating the support of the multifaith movement. But our bonds ran deeper than these professional titles. Nearly all of us had worked together to serve the community since 9/11. We saw one another as sisters and brothers in the trenches. Was what it all for, this decade of advocacy, if not to prevent a massacre like this? Amar hugged me – more like he caught me – and for one long moment, we let ourselves weep together and breathe together. “We may not live to see the fruits of our labor in our lifetime,” Amar said to me, “But we labor anyway.” I sat back down and held Sharat’s hand. The bodies of the dead were cremated after the ceremony, and in most cases, their ashes were returned to Punjab and poured in the sacred river Sutlej to merge with the ancestors.

Inhale.

Immediately after the memorial on Friday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney – who had referred to “the people who lost their lives at that sheik temple” – announced his vice presidential candidate. Oak Creek was in Senator Paul Ryan’s district. Ryan did not speak at the memorial but he was present, so Romney waited until the memorial was over and then announced Ryan as his running mate that afternoon. In an instant, I watched the media trucks in Oak Creek pack up and – disappear. Those of us who had been slotted for interviews on weekend television shows were bumped from our slots. We had hoped to move the public beyond Sikhism 101 into a national conversation about hate and white nationalism in America. But that was it. It was over. Our window closed. The shooting did not sustain national attention — not even for a week. 

But did we ever have the nation’s attention to begin with? Only one network CNN sent an anchor to report live from Oak Creek. None of the other networks gave the shooting the same extensive coverage as the shooting in Aurora a few weeks earlier, or the mass shootings to come. It took a massacre for Sikhs to receive the most national attention we had ever gotten in more than a century of history in the U.S. Thousands of vigils were held across the nation, hundreds of op-eds published, and it still was not enough. We had not succeeded in helping Americans as a whole imagine the gurdwara as a house of worship like their own, or see the people with turbans and headscarves as fellow Americans worthy of their attention, let alone their solidarity. To this day, people nod when I mention Aurora, Newtown, and Charleston, but they draw a blank when I say Oak Creek. As scholar Naunihal Singh reflects, had the shooter been Muslim and the victims white church-goers, it’s hard to imagine that anyone today would not know Oak Creek. 

And yet as Amar said, the labor continues. After the media trucks left that day, all of us who were advocates stayed on to tell the story of what happened next – 

Exhale.

Exactly one week after the shooting, the community reopened the gurdwara on Sunday morning for services. Hundreds of Sikhs from all corners of the Midwest and the country came to the gurdwara, now a site of pilgrimage. The astonishing thing is that the day was organized by the children of the dead – just a week after their parents were killed. Kamal and Harpreet were directing traffic as cars pulled into the gurdwara. Amardeep Kaleka, whose father was the deceased gurdwara president, directed the program. 

First, we all gathered outside around the Sikh flag – the Nishan Sahib. We washed the flag pole with water and milk, replaced its saffron cloth, and raised it again to the buoyant sound of our call and response: “Bole So Nihal! Satsriakal!” Then we poured into the main foyer of the gurdwara, now lined with flowers and portraits of the dead. The granthis had just finished the Akhand Path, the continuous reading of the Guru Granth Sahib that took three days. Now we were lining up to bow our heads before the scripture. At the doorway to the diwan hall, a single bullet hole remained and beneath it the words: “We are One. 8-5-12.” It was an embodiment of the Sikh spirit of Chardi Kala – an act of defiance, a declaration that we were not going to be deterred from rising up with love for all. 

The service, like all Sikh services, was comprised of kirtan. We listened to the poems in our scripture set to song and music. The sounds filled our chests:

Meditate and vibrate upon the One, 

and you shall cross over the terrifying world-ocean…

  Listen, you do not have to go to the house of death… 

Meditate on the Name and you shall dwell in the fearless Divine…

  The world is a just a dream. None of this is yours… 

As the bubbles in the water well up and disappear again, so is the universe created… Nothing is permanent…

My strength has been restored and my bonds have been broken, 

now I can do everything.

At the end, a granthi rose to deliver the Ardas, the final prayer in every Sikh service that invokes the bloodshed and resilience of our ancestors through history and culminates in a prayer for here and now. We rose to pray. I closed my eyes during the familiar chants. Then came the part that was for this moment, and we prayed for all who had been killed in the shooting. I heard each of the names of the dead – “Sita Singh, Ranjit Singh, Suveg Singh Khattra, Satwant Singh Kaleka. Prakash Singh, and Paramjit Kaur.” I heard the names of the wounded – “Lt. Brian Murphy, Baba Punjab Singh, Santokh Singh.”

Then I heard his name. “Wade Michael Page.”

Oh my god, we are praying for the soul of the gunman. I looked around. Everyone had their eyes closed and hands clasped. I took a breath and closed my eyes again. Wade Michael Page. Behind the expressionless face that stalked these halls was a frail white man who, too, deserved peace. 

Inhale. 

The final line of the Ardas rang out:

“Nanak Nam Chardi Kala Teray Banay Sarbat da Bhalla.”

“In the name of Divine Oneness, we find ever-rising high spirits.

Within your will, may there be grace for all of humanity.”

Exhale.

Kamal and Harpreet were sitting together in the same spot where their mother had bled to death, the spot where the FBI told them they wrapped her body. “When I sit here, I feel at peace,” Harpreet whispered to me. “It’s like feeling her hug me.” These young men had confided in me the impulse to find the white power group that radicalized Page and exact revenge. But that impulse had since receded. They were surrounded by community and breathing with community – breathing through the guilt and rage and grief and the letting the breath return them to their courage. “I don’t think much about the gunman anymore,” Kamal later declared. “Our community is not about retaliation, just a lot of love.”

After the prayers ended, speakers took the podium in the gurdwara. I presented to the children of the dead bound books that contained 4,000 prayers and letters of support Groundswell had collected from people all around the nation – so that they would remember in the quiet moments that they were still surrounded by our support. It would become a practice that we would repeat in the years to come. In the aftermath of every mass shooting on a house of worship – a church in Charleston, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, mosques in New Zealand – we would collect prayers and letters and funds to show that our love lasted long after media trucks left.

“We must live together as brothers and sisters or die apart as fools,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson to the community that day. The media was not there to hear his words. “Let your pain fortify your strength. In this place of worship, you were shot down, slaughtered, your worst fears realized, but you turned to each other, your Maker, and you turned to joy and hope. Sikhs, keep living, keep sharing, keep building, keep loving. There is power in your faith.” 

Inhale.

After the Sunday service, I learned that Baba Punjab Singh, the renowned teacher who had been wounded in the shooting, was being treated at Froedtert Hospital down the hall from Lt. Brian Murphy. His sons Raghuvinder and Jaspreet lived in India and got the news over the phone that their father was dead. Their mother Kulwant Kaur overheard them and went into shock. Then another phone call that night – he was alive but in critical condition. The sons flew to the U.S. on Friday night, rushed to the hospital, and found their father hooked up to a ventilator, his hands and feet swollen. They got to work. They massaged his body until the swelling went down and stayed at his bedside day and night, day and night, to the constant sound of prayers on a small radio. Their father had walked eight miles every morning, so they circled his legs each morning at the same time to keep up the routine. When Baba Punjab Singh opened his eyes for the first time on Tuesday, ten days after the shooting, he moved his lips to try to speak to his sons. But no sound came out. They weren’t discouraged. “He has doctors and family but also the power of God, healing power, from within,” Raghuvinder told me. His father was his best friend. He had to get better.

Now their mother had arrived from India, and we were accompanying her to see her husband for the first time. Mata Ji was quiet, draped in a shawl, prayer beads in her hand, “Waheguru” on her lips. We followed her into the hospital room and there he was – a grandfather cocooned in white sheets, hooked up to monitors, mouth agape, grey hair neatly tied in a small bun, skin glowing, eyes closed. Mata Ji set her head down at her husband’s feet and wept quietly. She grasped his hand and pressed his forehead and asked him to open his eyes. “Waheguru, Waheguru” she recited with each breath. 

“Baba Ji, rise up and tell us one of your great stories!” said Raghuvinder. “The sangat is waiting. All are praying for you,” But no response. I took Baba Punjab Singh’s hand, warm in mine, and gazed into his face. He looked like my grandfather. He looked like Papa Ji.

Outside the room, Raghuvinder told us, “People didn’t really know about Sikhs in this country before, did they? Millions of people know who we are now.” I remember hearing the same words from Rana Sodhi more than a decade ago after Balbir Uncle was killed. I wondered how many more of us had to die before the nation “knew” who we were? We didn’t need to be known. We needed to be loved. 

Exhale.

I took pen to paper and wrote an open letter to President Obama, asking him to come to Oak Creek. CNN ran the letter. “If Trayvon Martin could have been your son,” I wrote, “and the kids in the Aurora theater your daughters, then the aunts and uncles shot while praying that Sunday could have been your own too.” But this was not the only reason I wanted him to come. I saw that the Sikh community’s response to this massacre had something to offer the nation – how to grieve together, how to breathe through hate and violence together, how to practice love together. A colleague from the White House gave me a call. They were going to send Michelle Obama.

On Thursday, August 23^rd, I waited outside Oak Creek High School as family members went in to see the First Lady in a private meeting. When they walked out, I saw something new on their faces – I saw them smile. 

“She spent time with each family in turn, asking questions and listening to our pain and hope,” said Kamal.

“She told me that my father was a hero,” said Amardeep, whose father died fighting the gunman. “That meant a lot to me.”

“I’m really glad that the First Lady came,” said Harpreet. “I want to go into law enforcement to protect people and fulfill my mother’s dream, but I don’t want to give up my pagri, my turban. The first lady said that she would work on this for me, and I was shocked. She said that maybe one day I could become Secret Service and protect her!” Harpreet was beaming.

“Look, our parents were just grateful that flags were lowered to half-mast,” said Sandeep Khattra, whose grandfather had been killed. “But we grew up in this country, so we wanted more. We wanted to be heard. The First Lady’s visit feels like the first step.”

At the end, Kamal, Harpreet, Amardeep, and Sandeep presented the Michelle Obama with a gift: a simple orange wristband with the words “I Pledge Unity. August 5, 2012.” She pulled up a chair after meeting each family and said, as they remember it: “We have much work to do as a nation. I’m ready to do my part.”

Years later, when I got to spend a moment with her, I thanked Michelle Obama for coming to Oak Creek. The single gesture of shared grieving made a difference. It did not capture the nation’s attention as a President’s visit would have. But it gave us energy. It emboldened us. Our labor continued. It was time to organize.

Inhale.

Since Balbir Uncle’s death after 9/11, hate crimes against Sikh, Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Americans had only become more violent. But our communities had also organized together in the last decade. We had grown existing community organizations in scope and impact – South Asian Americans Leading Together, the Sikh Legal Defense and Education Fund, and United Sikhs. And new organizations were born, including the Sikh Coalition. Shortly after 9/11, I had filmed one of their first meetings in an empty office building in Manhattan not far from Ground Zero where the rubble was still smoking. They were a band of young Sikh lawyers volunteering their time to try to respond to the torrent of calls and emails from Sikhs reporting hate violence in the hours and days following the terrorist attacks. Now the Sikh Coalition was the nation’s leading Sikh civil rights organization, leading the policy response to Oak Creek. At the national and local level, we had allies that did not exist before, and with the advent of social media and digital platforms, more of us had ways to tell our own community’s stories as artists, writers, scholars, reporters, and filmmakers. We finally had the infrastructure to pursue policy change with the backing of a movement behind us.

We had to seize the window. We never had so many allies grieve with us before, especially faith communities, but if we waited too long, everyone would disperse. So we decided to harness all that energy into a single policy goal. We chose to demand that the government to track hate crimes against Sikhs and other minority groups. It seemed like a simple enough ask. The FBI tracks all hate crimes on Form 1-699, the Hate Crime Incident Report. Statistics collected on this form allow law enforcement officials to analyze trends in hate crimes and allocate resources appropriately. But under the FBI’s tracking system, there was no category for anti-Sikh hate crimes. They were lumped in with “anti-Muslim” crimes. The same was true for Hindus, Arabs, and other minorities. Advocates had been asking for years for separate categories so that we could specifically measure and marshal the resources to respond to hate crimes against our communities. 

I sat with Police Chief John Edwards as he puzzled over the form. “There is no box for me to record the six homicides at the gurdwara down the street as anti-Sikh crimes,” he said to me. “How can we combat a problem we are not even measuring?”

On September 19^th, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on “hate crimes and the threat of domestic extremism,” chaired by Senator Durbin. It was made possible by round-the-clock advocacy by the Sikh Coalition along with SALDEF and SAALT. At that point, Congress had held dozens of hearings on the threat of al Qaeda and its affiliates, even though there had been twice as many attacks on U.S. soil by white supremacist groups than by al-Qaeda-inspired groups since 9/11. More people had been killed by white nationalists than by any other kind of terrorist since 9/11. This would be the first hearing in recent history on the threat of homegrown hate. It would also be the first-ever congressional hearing on hate crimes against Sikhs. The Sikh Coalition tapped Harpreet Saini to testify about losing his mother, and we all helped him craft his testimony.

Sharat and I sat with Harpreet in a hotel room between open boxes of pizza and watched him practice his testimony for hours with Gurjot Kaur, a fierce lawyer from the Sikh Coalition and someone who would become a Sikh sister to me. Harpreet was shy and sensitive, his speech halting. But he was determined to get it right. His friends helped him shop for new clothes and shoes to wear to the Senate. Gurjot helped him practice for hours on end. We took breaks to make him laugh. He grasped the script and kept practicing as he and Kamal boarded a plane to DC for the first time. He was nervous in the minutes before he was called into the hearing room. But when it was his turn, Harpreet faced the Senators and took a breath and became the voice of our community. Just forty-five days after his mother’s murder, Harpreet Singh Saini became the first Sikh in U.S. history to testify before Congress.

“I had my first day of college and my mother wasn’t there to send me off,” Harpreet said. More than 400 people sat behind Harpreet and in the overflow room. People wept quietly as he spoke.

“I want to protect other people from what happened to my mother,” said Harpeeet. “I want to combat hate – not just against Sikhs but against all people.” He told the Senators that he and his brother wanted to be police officers like Lt. Murphy so that they could serve and protect others just as he did for our community. Then he made our policy asks.

First, Harpreet asked that the FBI begin to track hate crimes against Sikhs. “Senators, I came here today to ask the government to give my mother the dignity of at least being a statistic,” he said. “My mother and those shot that day will not even count on a federal form.”

Second, he asked that the government invest resources into combatting violent right-wing domestic terrorism. The Southern Poverty Law Center had tracked Page for a decade but the government did not have a case on him. “I believe the government could have tracked him long before he went on a shooting spree,” he said.

Later that day, former Department of Homeland Security analyst witness Daryl Johnson would testify that the government had effectively turned a blind eye to right-wing domestic extremism. At DHS, Johnson authored a 2009 report on the alarming rise of white supremacist hate groups after President Obama’s election. The Department caved into the political backlash and shut down Johnson’s team of five. It left just one analyst to focus on domestic terrorism by non-Muslims in a time of “heightened extremist activity throughout the country.” Could have Oak Creek been prevented had our government made our protection a priority? Could future Oak Creeks be prevented if we act now?

“Finally, Senators, I ask that you stand up for us,” said Harpreet. “As lawmakers and leaders, you have the power to shape public opinion. Your words carry weight. When others scapegoat or demean people because of who they are, use your power to say that is wrong.”

The Oak Creek massacre had taken place during the 2012 election season during a resurgence of anti-Islam propaganda. The Center for American Progress reported that between 2001 and 2009, seven foundations had poured $42.6 million into well-organized think tanks to promote anti-Islam ideologies through blogs, books and films. This propaganda became popular in the 2010 election season when some candidates used it to denigrate Islam and vilify Muslim Americans during their campaigns. At the same time as the explosive growth of the anti-Islam industry, there was an alarming rise of white supremacist groups in America. The number of hate groups had grown by almost 60 percent since 2000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. They numbered more than a thousand. Muslim American advocates like Wajahat Ali were raising the alarm about the Islamophobia industry, but few paid enough attention. We did not know it then but we were seeing the makings of a white nationalist “awakening” that would come to define the Trump era. 

After the Senate hearing ended, we gathered for a press conference in the hall outside. I spoke next to Black, Muslim, LGTBQI, and other Sikh advocates. Together we articulated the shared moral imperative to end hate in America. We did not know it then but were witnessing the makings of the deep solidarity we would need to survive the Trump era.

That night, after the historic Senate hearing, Sharat and I took Harpreet and Kamal and their friends to see the monuments in Washington, D.C. It was their first time. We went from the Lincoln Memorial to the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial. We gazed up at the words etched into the monument of Dr. King: “Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” Harpreet said to me, “I feel my mom is still watching over us. That’s what made today happen.”

In the ten months that followed, the Sikh Coalition and allies led a full-throated campaign to change how the government tracked hate crimes against Sikhs, Hindus, Arabs and other at-risk communities. Senator Dick Durbin and more than 100 bipartisan members of Congress supported the policy change. Four thousand people of all faiths signed petitions collected by Groundswell. We fought for this single policy change together – and finally won. For the first time in U.S. history, our government began tracking hate crimes against Sikh Americans, along with Arabs, Buddhists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Orthodox Christians.

“It makes me feel we did something for our mom,” Harpreet told me, fighting back tears, when the policy victory was announced. “The grief feels the same as it did the day she died. But at least I know that she would be proud.”

Exhale.

“I see a lot of victims,” Police Chief John Edwards told me. “I always saw people want revenge. Meeting this group of people changed me. All I’ve seen is compassion and love and support – not only for us but for the entire city. And Wade Michael Page too. It’s changed a lot of people. My officers spend a lot of time at the gurdwara now. They stop in, they go to the services – that’s unusual.”

Today the gurdwara in Oak Creek is now a community center that is not only for Sikhs but for the whole community. That white man sharing a meal in the langar hall is Steve Scaffidi, the small-town mayor who had been thrust on the national stage and rose to manage the crisis. He’s now a national voice for gun safety laws. “I’m proud to represent Oak Creek,” he said. “Not as a scene of violence, but as a symbol of what one small community can do.” 

This white man over here sharing a cup of chai and talking with community members is James Santelle, the state’s U.S. Attorney General who had ensured the community had the full support of government resources. He is now fluent in Sikh concepts and history and can even speak to us in a little Punjabi. 

And if you come on a quiet morning, you will find a certain police officer in the diwan hall, sitting quietly, head bowed in prayerful silence. Lt. Brian Murphy survived the shooting rampage but not without a lot of pain. In those first weeks in the hospital, he dreaded the moments in the middle of the night when nurses came to suction out his trachea. It felt like drowning. But then he looked up at the thank you letters pinned on his wall – thousands of letters pouring in from Sikhs across Wisconsin and the U.S. and the entire world – and thought, “I got thousands of people behind me, my family and friends and the entire law enforcement community… and now the Sikh community too.” He became a legend to Sikhs worldwide. There are framed pictures of him on the walls of Sikh gurdwaras around America. To the Sikhs in Oak Creek, he is also a friend. Brian says to the congregation in a whisper, “My voice has been replaced by yours of Chardi Kala.” Chardi Kala – ever-rising spirits.

Brian doesn’t like to talk about himself. I pushed him to help me understand what it is like to take fifteen bullets in your body and live. His voice box is permanently damaged, but he can still speak in a hushed whisper. “On a good day it feels like someone holding you by your neck,” he confided. “On a bad day it feels like someone squeezing you by the throat. There’s no point in any day that I’m released from this pain.”

Brian’s wounds forced him to retire from the police department. At first, he was racked with survivor’s guilt. Then he decided to use his time as best he could. He began to travel the country to train police officers on crisis-response and speak publicly on the need to protect Sikhs and other communities of color, even challenging Trump directly on the campaign trail. He asked him at a CNN Townhall Meeting what he would do to protect religious minorities in America. The candidate evaded the question.

When Kamal reached out to Brian a year after the shooting, Brian stepped up to become a father figure to him and Harpreet. By that time, the brothers had moved into their own apartment. They had created a makeshift memorial for their mother in their living room. They placed the white shoes she was wearing that day at the foot of her portrait and draped her face with the chuni she was wearing that morning. “It still smells like her,” Kamal said. Next to the portrait is a piece of carpet where her body was found. Kamal bought a jewelry box where he put the rings and necklace she was wearing that day. I come home to her every day,” he said. “It’s the first thing I see when I walk through the door. I matha tek to her, Hey mom.” Kamal slept on the ground of the living room, at her feet. 

Kamal and Harpreet were struggling in their missions to become police officers, so Kamal signed up to become a Marine instead. Because that’s what Brian had done. He sent Brian letters while in boot camp. The first letters were all about how much he hated it. Brian noticed a growing confidence as the weeks went on. By the end, Kamal wrote, “My dress blues just came in and I look so cool!” Now Kamal comes home in uniform, tall and cut and proud, and meets with Brian over coffee at their favorite place for advice and support.

“Now I wake up every day knowing that I am the son of Paramjit Kaur,” said Kamal. “I have a purpose to live for, which is to represent my mom for the rest of my life now. Wade’s message was to divide people and spread hate. By me doing this, I think it sends a message that what he did not matter at all. Because I’m still serving the country that took my mom away.”

Kamal tries to come home for the anniversary of the shooting nearly every year on August 5th. Together they organize an annual memorial walk and run in the field behind Oak Creek High School in honor of the dead under the theme “Chardi Kala.” They string banners and blow up orange and blue balloons and arrange speakers and music, reclaiming life out of death. No matter where they are, when the clock strikes 10:50am on August 5^th, the minute their mother was killed, Kamal and Harpreet always step away from the fray and spend the moment alone, Kamal’s arm over Harpreet, taking a breath. Then they spend the rest of the weekend with other sons and daughters whose lives have also been transformed, like Pardeep Kaleka. 

After his father was killed, Pardeep was desperate for answers. He saw Arno Michaelis on TV. Arno was a former white supremacist who founded the white power skinhead group that radicalized the gunman. He spent seven years in the white power movement as an active organizer, leader, and recruiter. He had since renounced his allegiance to the skinhead group and became an eloquent and powerful messenger about life after hate. But Arno was wracked with guilt after the mass shooting and searching for what to do. Pardeep reached out and the two agreed to meet at a café. 

“Why?” Pardeep wanted to know what drove the gunman. 

Arno explained how the skinhead group gave him a sense of belonging, filled a hole in his life. Until all the people he was trying to hate – a Jewish boss, a gay supervisor, black and brown co-workers – showed him kindness again and again. Hate became too exhausting. Arno described the suffering and loneliness of the young men in the white power movement. He thought the solution was to meet hate with love, even for them.

It was the beginning of an unlikely friendship. Pardeep and Arno became brothers, and alongside Mandeep Kaur, Rahul Dubey, and the other young people of Oak Creek, they formed Serve2Unite, an initiative that has reached tens of thousands of young people in Milwaukee-area schools with their message of love over hate. And every year, on August 5^th, they return to the gurdwara as a site of physical pilgrimage, a place to reunite with all the other families and survivors and allies, their bonds strong, their lives changed. 

Inhale

There is one family, however, for whom time has stood still. As days turned into weeks, weeks into months, months into years, the grandfather Baba Punjab Singh’s condition never changed. He remained in a hospital bed, unable to move or speak, except to blink his eyes. His sons Raghuvinder and Jaspreet remained by his side around the clock since the shooting. Neither saw their wives or children in India for that first year. Jaspreet’s wife had given birth to a baby girl Ekom a few months after he had left and he had yet to hold her. Eventually the sons moved their families to the U.S. so that they could take turns taking care of their father together. 

“It’s still August 5^th,” Raghuvinder told me. “It has always been August 5^th. The pain is evergreen. A year feels like a week. Every day we go to the hospital, and every day we see him in the same condition. Nothing has changed.”

There was anguish around his mouth, and weariness around his eyes, but he still exuded warmth. We had become so close over the years that I now called him “Veer Ji,” which means elder brother.

“Every day we live in Chardi Kala,” Veer Ji said. 

There was the invocation of “Chardi Kala” again. Chardi Kala was woven into Sikh scriptures and our vernacular, commonly translated as “relentless optimism.” But what I witnessed in Oak Creek and what I learned from this family was different from optimism. This was not about the future at all. This was about a state of being in the present moment, as if now is all there is. Now and now and now. It is moving from Moment with a capital M to Moment with a capital M. This is a state of joyfulness inside the struggle — an energy that keeps us in motion, a breathing that keeps us laboring, even inside the pain of labor. Hope was a feeling that waxes and wanes, sometimes brilliant and luminous, sometimes a faint sliver in the sky, sometimes gone completely. No matter how hopeful or hopeless we feel, we can choose to return to the labor in love anyway. Sometimes we receive the gift of our labor. Sometimes we do not. But it does not matter. Because when we labor in love, labor is not only a means but an end in itself. 

I once spent a day with Veer Ji and his family at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab – the most revered gurdwara for Sikhs in India and around the world. There is a picture of the Golden Temple in every gurdwara around the world. It is at once a physical site of pilgrimage and an ever-present source of strength. The moment we walked in from the noise and dust outside, it felt like entering peace on all sides. We sat together on the cool marble and prayed for his father and gazed at the gurdwara that shone like a golden palace on blue waters. Blood had been spilled here too, even in these pure waters, as recently as during the pogroms of 1984. And yet our ancestors had cleaned the blood with their own hands, made the sanctuary anew, and cleared the way for new life. Baby Ekom played around us, and Veer Ji scooped her into his arms and she giggled. Her name means Oneness – Guru Nanak’s vision, the call to love that flows to us even now. Just then “Tati Vao Na Lagi” began to sound on the loudspeakers, Papa Ji’s prayer: The hot winds cannot touch us. I laughed and took a deep breath. Vismaad. Sitting there, with the sound of our ancestors all around us, the shining temple before us, and new life in our arms, I was finally learning how to breathe. When we breathe, we bring our senses to the present moment and make space for joy. So that’s the secret to living inside of Chardi Kala – ever-rising spirits even in darkness, joy even in struggle – one breath at a time.

Exhale

These days, each visit is the same. I walk into Baba Punjab Singh’s room and the sound of ever-constant prayers. I help Veer Ji and his daughter Amrit wash his hair and braid it in one long braid. Like them, I call him Papa Ji, which means Father. I rub oil into his skin and massage his legs. I take his hand into mine. His eyes open. His eyes sparkle. 

“Papa Ji, do you recognize me?” I ask. He can only blink to communicate – once for no, twice for yes.

He blinks twice.

“Papa Ji, we are all praying for you. Do you feel our prayers and our love?” I ask.

He blinks twice.

Veer Ji asks his father: “Papa Ji, are you in Chardi Kala?”

And Baba Punjab Singh blinks – twice. 

Yes, I am in Chardi Kala.

If Baba Punjab Singh can live in a state of Chardi Kala, we can too.

The family wishes that no one take photographs of his face, so every time, before I leave, I spend a long time looking into his eyes so that I can take him with me. Baba Punjab Singh represents the state of the Sikh community. We arrived in America more than a century ago with vitality, potential, wisdom, and many words – but hate in the form of white supremacist violence has tried to kill us. Hate paralyzes our bodies and silences our voices. It finds us in our homes and houses of worship, our schools and streets, subways and screens. Hate strips us of language and denies us recognition. To this day, America cannot pronounce our names or remember our tragedies. Our turbans mark us as terrorists, not seekers of truth and justice. America forgets us, or never knew us to begin with. Yet we go on living; we refuse to die. In fact, we find a way, beyond all odds, to communicate that we are still residing in the Sikh spirit of Chardi Kala. We blink twice. That is our defiance — to practice love even in hopelessness. And to tell you so. So that you might take our hand, and love us too.

***

That December, we returned to Oak Creek with a short film Sharat and I had made for the community. We screened it for families in a theater, just for them, before releasing it. After the film ended, Kamal and Harpreet and Pardeep stood up to tell their stories and brought the audience to tears and inspired new connections. We felt complete.

As we flew back home, I thought about all that I was witnessing. There were so many elements of revolutionary love on display in Oak Creek – love for others and love for opponents. In the wake of the tragedy, enough people chose to wonder about us and listen to our stories and share our pain. The Sikh community knew how to grieve together and made space for others to join us. In grieving together, in person and online, we built bonds strong enough to organize together, and our allies followed our lead to fight for various social and policy changes. Along the way, we offered each other safe containers for rage – rage for the gunman, and rage for lawmakers who did nothing, or not enough. Some of us had the ability to listen to people who helped us understand the gunman’s context. This helped us focus on the change we wanted to make – to shift our nation’s culture and institutions. So we chose to reimagine how our nation prioritizes, tracks and responds to violence against our communities. Throughout, we were helping one another breathe and taking care of one another in the labor. 

Sharat had been breathing with me the whole time, by my side. When the plane touched down, the two of us had one task left for the year: to pack our carry-ons and finally go on our honeymoon. 

I looked at my phone as the plane taxied to the gate. Breaking news: Twenty children and seven adults had been killed in a mass shooting inside an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. We had literally traveled from the site of one mass shooting to another. 

Living in New Haven, Newtown was in our own backyard, so we drove there straight from the airport. We saw people in their cars at stop lights, hunched over the driver’s wheel, sobbing. It was if news of the horror was reverberating out from the epicenter of the school in all directions, enveloping us. A church in the small town was holding a vigil for the community. We sat in the pews beside mothers and fathers holding their children tight, teenagers choking back tears, and grandparents quiet and solemn. An army of media cameras waited outside, but inside the church, families mourned openly and cried openly and sang and cried again. Sharat and I embraced people we did not know, wiping away tears. We were breathing in community in this church, just as we had breathed in the gurdwara.

I thought – this is it. Newtown will be the tipping point in the movement to end gun violence in America. The massacre of children will wake the nation’s conscience. 

But it would not be enough. The list of mass shootings would only grow – a queer night club in Orlando, a music concert in Las Vegas, a high school in Florida – and Congress would fail to pass any meaningful laws to stop them. Not even background checks. Not even when the majority of the country wanted them. “Thoughts and prayers” would become the refrain of lawmakers who did nothing. In the years to come, Oak Creek would become the first of many houses of worship attacked by white nationalists this decade. The death toll would rise rapidly: two people at a Jewish community center in Kansas City in 2014; nine people in a historically black church in Charleston in 2015; six people in a mosque in Quebec in 2017; eleven people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; forty people in mosques in Christchurch in 2019; one in a synagogue in Poway near San Diego shortly after. I could not have imagined we would see so many Oak Creeks in succession. Back then, we had to link the massacre in Oak Creek to the 16^th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, the last major attack on a faith community, separated by fifty years, just to get people to understand the terror it inflicted. Now these attacks are routine. And behind the headlines of each of these shootings are stories of the dead and living that are just as complex and deep as what we saw in Oak Creek.

It did not have to be this way. 

The killers in these shootings belong to a global network of heavily armed men, connected across continents by the internet and social media, rising in power and influence, emboldened by demagogues in the U.S. and around the world who encourage white extremist ideology and violence. They know that bloodshed inside our houses of worship inflicts a specifically searing horror. After Oak Creek, our nation could have named white nationalist violence a national and global threat and poured resources into fighting to protect our communities. We could have held tech companies accountable for the rapid spread of hate and misinformation on social media platforms. We could have passed strong laws that prohibited profiling like the End Racial Profiling Act and created taskforces modeled after the National Church Arson Taskforce of the 1990s. We could have modeled for the world how to respond to tribal nationalism and initiated local and national dialogues on ending white supremacy. We certainly could have limited the free flow of guns. 

As it was, our tiny community had to fight with all our might just to add a box to a federal form. We are not helpless in the wake of this violence. But it will take all of us to change the culture and institutions that authorize, enable, and radicalize hate. The labor is simply much harder, and longer, and more painful now. 

“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that loves comes with community,” wrote Dorothy Day.

That night, in the church in Newtown, grieving those small children, holding Sharat’s hand, I felt my face wet with tears in the long night. The choir sang one last hymn to end the service, and we all joined our voices together in the Hymn of Promise: 

“In the cold and snow of winter, there’s a spring that waits to be

unrevealed until its season, something God alone can see.” 

I thought, “It may be that God alone can see it. But only we can plant the seeds.”

 

***********************