Dear Friends,
By now, we have heard and read and talked about the events in Blacksburg, Virginia, earlier this week. We have encountered reactions from news commentators and websites and struggled to digest such unspeakable events. However, we are still stunned into silence, mostly, pondering quietly among our closest friends and co-workers and family members the ‘why’ of such an act by someone who, we have come to discover, seems to have had some serious mental/psychological challenges that would drive him to kill 33 fellow citizens of the Virginia Tech community. Answers do not come easily, and we, standing at a distance of quite a few hundred miles from the event as we do, find ourselves seeking ways to resume our normal lives, despite the continuing news reports, more or less untouched by those things which we wish had not happened but which we are glad did not happen to us.
Lest we become too casual or calloused, however, we can only be reminded that for those directly affected by the tragedy life will never be normal again. Hope and the future are lost for those parents whose sons and daughters were killed, including the parents of the young man who has been named the shooter. Some part of each parent and brother and sister of the victims dies with their loved one and is buried never to be seen or enjoyed or loved again except in memory. There is no lost sheep to be found when the loved one is killed. The 17th Century cleric and poet, John Donne, is correct when he says,
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
A part of us died this week in Blacksburg, Virginia. We are a part of the larger community, a "part of the main." We remember silently and only in quiet conversation those who struggle with a totally senseless killing, just as we struggle ourselves. Where is God when such a thing takes place? How could God let this thing happen? Why didn’t he stop the boy with the guns? I wish I had the answers and I would happily and lovingly share them with you.
We remember silently and quietly other tragedies which remain fresh on our minds even though they are several years back, like Columbine and 9/11 and Oklahoma City. Nothing is as horrendous as those horribly inhuman events … except the one that has happened just now. We still recoil in shock.
We remember silently and quietly those discussions of security and the curtailment of dangerous weapons in the hands of those who pose a threat. But, who could know this? How can we know someone is contemplating mass murder? How can we know that someone can no longer see the precious value of human life? How can we know? While I do not debate here the goodness or badness of guns, I wonder what it is in our society that makes someone want to kill someone else. Would it be helpful and promising for future generations if we never teach our young to kill, to fight, to go to war, to de-humanize, to waste humanity? What if, rather than holding ourselves up as the most important ones in the universe, we treat ourselves as the least, as did one who walked before us, or at a very minimum, least teach everyone that everyone else is just as important? Can we even conceive of such a notion?
In the midst of my ranting questions, I am reminded again, as I have been many times before, that while I do not understand the ‘why’ of events such as the tragedy in Blacksburg, I do know without question that such an event is an opportunity for us to find God once again. These are the moments in life, troubling as they are for us, when God ‘does his thing,’ like reminding us how horrible it is to kill, like reminding us that God is very present to comfort and to pour oil on the wounds of those who suffer from such terrible loss, like enfolding us in his loving arms and saying once again, for the millionth time, that we are deeply loved, that we are mourned for by our Creator and Friend, that this is the One who suffers with us, knowing very well himself the devastating sense of loss that comes with the death of a child. God is in the lifeless bodies left on the classroom floor. God is in the deeply pained classmates still living. God is in the grieving parents still loving. God is present in very real and powerful ways in Blacksburg as you and I send up prayer after prayer for all who are affected and all who care.
Please keep this community in your prayers, as I know you will. But also, please keep our people … all of us throughout the world … in your prayers, that we may learn not to kill and maim and destroy. Nobody wins. And, pray that we may, naïve as you think it may be, learn instead to love. Everybody wins. For those of us who are Jewish, do you remember what God did on Passover? He made sure death would not come to the chosen people. That’s you and me. Not long after that, he said on the mountain (even wrote it down), “Don’t kill.” And, for those of us who are Christian, did you notice what happened a week ago last Friday? He died. He died because he loves us. He died and rose again three days later so that you and I may be wrapped in that same love, so that we can share it with everyone else, and so that we can learn not to kill.
May God bring peace to your hearts.
Tom
