Our Common Humanity

As the news about the mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando came upon me yesterday, I found myself caught short.  In a nation where these things seem to happen with great regularity, it is easy, eventually, to fail to see the death of 5 or 10 or even 50 people as anything other than “everyday life.”  For this sin of complacency, I continually ask God for forgiveness.  Still, there was something about the events in Pulse that made this one feel different.  My response wasn’t quite as visceral as the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and yet there were some stark similarities for me.

I came to understand this feeling deep within me with the help of a post my mother would later write on her Facebook feed.  My mother’s brother was a gay man who contract HIV in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.  He…