What does peace mean when a gun is pointed at you?

Exactly one year ago, on December 14, 2007, I was shot.

Here are the details. It was a Saturday evening, a week before Christmas. At 5:00 p.m. I walked to my car from a grocery store at Selby and Dale in St. Paul. As I neared the parking lot there was a loud bang and I felt what seemed like an explosion of sharp rocks hitting my legs. I looked across the street and a man in a large SUV was pointing a gun at me. After running back into the store and checking that I wasn’t bleeding (I wasn’t) a store clerk called 911. I took the policeman who arrived to where the shooting occurred. Next to where I had stood, windows of a car had been shot out.

Perhaps more than the image of a gun pointed at me, the blown out windows said, this is real, this really happened. This feeling was confirmed even more starkly when a few days later I received a letter from the police department that began with the words, “You are a victim of a crime.”

I was unable to give the police clear identifying information of either the vehicle or shooter, so there was little the policeman or the squad cars that kept showing up could do.

In the next days my first inclination was to not talk about what happened. After all, when someone asks, “How was your weekend?” unless you’re a drama queen, who wants to say, “Oh fine, except for when I got shot at”?

But I did need to talk about it, and sharing the story gave my friends openings to talk about the things they don’t say when someone asks, “How you doing?” I learned a lot about how violence touches or has touched many people I know.

One of the things I have been meditating on this last year is that an experience like this can give one an opportunity for insight into the kind of conditions all humans feel. In particular, I have thought a lot about what it means to be vulnerable. Is there a more vulnerable position to be in than standing on a sidewalk with a loaded gun pointed at you?

It is our human condition to be vulnerable—vulnerable to acts of random violence (such as the terrible shooting spree in Mumbai), vulnerable to loss, vulnerable to chance catastrophes like the collapse of the 35W bridge, vulnerable to our own dying—it is an ongoing condition we all know but rarely acknowledge. And does not the issue of vulnerability play out on the larger scale of nations? America was always vulnerable to such attacks as those on September 11, and we still are. Instead of admitting our vulnerability, America sought the bully’s role and hammered Afghanistan and Iraq with fists of fire. Our weapons and armies showed the world that we could kill more people than they did, that we are anything but vulnerable. Perhaps only some Americans bought that fantasy. It is my hope that Obama’s election shows how many people did NOT buy that fantasy!

When I told one friend about the incident, her first reaction was “To have something like that happen to someone who teaches peace.” Other reactions told me that what happened to me was most people’s worst nightmare. So what does someone who teaches peace and is committed to nonviolence do with all this?

I strangely have a better appreciation for why decent, kind people buy guns. I know now why many lock their car doors when driving through the city. Maybe I even appreciate better why countries expend so many resources to arm themselves.

But I ask myself this, if I had a gun in that situation, what value would it have had? I could have shot back. And such an act would have violated every value I have that is engrained in each cell of my body. I will not live a life on the ready to shoot back.

I stand on different ground than I did before this incident. It is a more uncertain ground, and I have more questions than answers. Will I feel safe again? Is safety actually an illusion? How are you supposed to respond to violence? What should you do with your fear? What do I do with this insight into vulnerability, and does it have something to do with compassion? And what does peace mean when there is a gun pointed at you?

I have no answers. And maybe not having answers to such questions is one more thing that we all have in common.