Virginia Tech
After I heard the story, the only words I could utter were “Oh No!”
TV demonstrates how ruptured the world is. As I am on the treadmill, listening to my Ipod shuffle to “O Come All Ye Faithful” when I first learn the story. The TV has a text feed that is reporting one young woman who has just gone to mass. She says “it felt very real.”
Contrast to the previous day: she hears the shots; she hides; she doesn’t know where to go. The experience: surreal. Time shortens and becomes incomprehensible; people are trapped; they sense directly being on the boundary of life and death. Real? Or Unreal?
For her, it was gathering, as prayer, as real.
It is an interesting exercise of the human imagination: shooting – the hell of a violent death – reconstructed as surreal. We do not say, precisely, that it was not real: yes, it was. For each family who will live with the consequences: it will be painfully real. But this young woman separated where she found meaning. She could not find meaning in the death. Life is real. This is provocative: she determined that suffering – needless, pointless suffering – is not where we locate meaning.
I recognize that for lots of Christians, suffering is how we create meaning. Perhaps suffering does allow us to see details. It may make us pay attention.
It is not, however, the last word.
We don’t celebrate Holy Saturday at St. Barts, but one reason we have a day that separates Good Friday from the Resurrection is to cut the causal link between suffering and resurrection. Yes – one happens after the other, but the resurrection does not happen because of suffering. It happens to transform it. The resurrection is what transforms our understanding of suffering. It is the light that exposes suffering and our lives, making them comprehensible. Holy Saturday destroys the connection that necessitates and elevates suffering as a precondition to the resurrection. No – there is no meaning in the suffering. All we can suppose is that it may guide us to pay attention.
Each life lost is another nail in the cross of our savior. Upon the cross, suffering is elevated and rendered powerless; it dis-illusion our own limited power. The cross, itself, is not magnificent, as divine, as holy, but only as a reflection of whatever hope we can muster. What we do now, is just, as we always do in such tragedies, is look at the horror, cringe in embarrassment toward a God who could let such suffering happen and gather the faithful.
Yes there is suffering. All it does is turn us, again, to where the bodies are laid. We are moved to gesture: to hug, to kneel, to share our french-fries with neighbors. We draw symbols, we say words to the dead. These are natural, human, real responses.
As we gather, the divine fire is lit. I don't know where Easter will take us, and after such a good Friday event I can only wait, weep and watch this night.
I've been struck by how in this age our mental life easily separates into categories. I sit comfortably near a computer; friends of mine have had to deal with a terrible storm. I have to invite people to have fun at another event, but it feels strange to do so, even though I have been asked to organize. I consider Iraq where 600,000 people have died. Alas, that number I cannot understand. That number makes me cold.
But 32 college students, with names and pictures, I am sorely grieved.
And perhaps this is one aspect of my own sin.