Unnatural shocks

  • halfmastflag.jpgThe spring air was deli­cious when I left the gro­cery store yes­ter­day, and I couldn’t resist just sit­ting in the car with the win­dows down for a minute feel­ing the breeze on my face. It took me a minute to focus my eyes on the large flag flap­ping gen­tly on the flag­pole of the restau­rant in front of me and it took a minute for me to fig­ure out what was incon­gru­ous. The flag was at half-mast. I was sur­prised. “Who died?” I said to no one in par­tic­u­lar. And then, of course, it came to me.

    It seemed impos­si­ble on a light, bright spring day to believe that a col­lege stu­dent had killed 32 peo­ple, wounded 27 (or maybe more? the news reports still vary on this) and then com­mit­ted sui­cide. The facts are still hazy, but I pre­fer them that way right now. I’m sure in time I won’t be able to avoid know­ing more about this. I’ll hear the attempts to under­stand some­thing that will help, the hind­sight about what the uni­ver­sity or our soci­ety should have done dif­fer­ent. And there will be totally ham­fisted attempts com­ing along shortly to tie in one 20-year-old South Korean student’s mas­sacre with some great national debate. They’ll come from the cen­ter, the right and the left. Some will have some points nearer the truth. Some will barely be relevant.

    There will be law­suits. There will be impas­sioned pleas for more leg­is­la­tion. There will be lots and lots of talk about how to watch for warn­ing signs and the needs for tighter secu­rity. We’ll all gab about this until we no longer care, and when we’ve reached the point where we believe we’ve taken some steps, reached some con­clu­sions, learned some les­son, the soci­ety will start to go back to busi­ness again and we’ll be able to file it away with all the other uncon­scionable acts we learn of dur­ing our life­times. “The thou­sand nat­ural shocks that flesh is heir to,” as Ham­let put it.

    But there’s talk that we don’t have, mostly about how com­pletely inca­pable we really are of pre­vent­ing these things from hap­pen­ing. We don’t talk about the fact that we really aren’t safe, and that no lit­i­ga­tion or fresh round of laws can change that.

    Met­ro­pol­i­tan Philip issued a state­ment yes­ter­day. It was short and didn’t attempt com­pli­cated lan­guage about how we need to try to feel bet­ter or see a sil­ver lin­ing. Here it is in its entirety for those that didn’t see it:

    Beloved in Christ:

    Christ is risen!

    It is with deep pain that I watched the tragic events unfold on one of our col­lege cam­puses. This could have been any cam­pus and any one of our many col­lege stu­dents. As such, I have no doubt that our own col­lege chil­dren and par­ents were affected by yesterday’s events even more than the rest of us. What should be places of tran­quil­ity and peace have too often become places of tragedy. Places where par­ents should be able to send their teens to become edu­cated adults and where chil­dren go to expand their minds and gain knowl­edge that will enable them to be pro­duc­tive mem­bers of soci­ety must be safe and free of evil and destruc­tion of all kinds. The hope­less­ness of the man who per­pe­trated these sense­less killings can only rein­force the need of our clergy and lay lead­ers to instill in our faith­ful, and espe­cially in our youth, the need for strong, tra­di­tional fam­i­lies as well as val­ues that are rooted in Christ and the Church.

    On behalf of my brother bish­ops and all the clergy and faith­ful of our Arch­dio­cese, we express our deep­est sym­pa­thy to the fam­i­lies of those who were mur­dered or injured yes­ter­day. In addi­tion, we pray that our risen Lord Jesus Christ, who destroyed death, will grant the fam­i­lies and the entire coun­try the peace and hope that only the empty tomb can provide.

    In the Risen Lord,

    +Met­ro­pol­i­tan PHILIP
    Arch­bishop of New York and Met­ro­pol­i­tan of all North America

    Per­haps every­one wants to hear a lot of words right now, but few words are bet­ter if they are direct. The Chris­t­ian response to these tragedies doesn’t please us or offer us false hope based on man-made solu­tions, but it does save us in the way that only the truth can. There is evil in the world. This isn’t a game we play or happy thoughts we indulge in — the earth is a place of war­fare. We could all be tat­tooed with Nevada’s state motto: Bat­tle born.

    There are aspects to this mas­sacre that are worse than oth­ers we’ve seen. There is a cal­cu­la­tion and a wish not just to mur­der but to annil­hi­late, as if the killer didn’t just want to end lives but end the entire con­text they had been liv­ing in. But in most ways, it is just the lat­est instance of some­thing we’d rather not see. The fact that it’s harder and harder to get our atten­tion just makes it hurt all the more when some­thing is so bad we can’t block it out.

    Here is the Web-site memo­riam for Vir­ginia Tech. It is being updated as names are released.

    I don’t know if any of them were Ortho­dox, but I hope it’s per­mis­si­ble to say all the same — mem­ory eternal.


    Related posts:

    1. Bright Week do’s & don’ts
    2. Pascha on the porch
    3. The morn­ing after — ahhh.
    4. Yes, Vir­ginia, there is a St. Nicholas
    5. Laws for the sake of laws

    April 19th, 2007 | Grace | No Comments |

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