SCHLEICHER — Leave room for grief
“Thus says the Lord: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.’” — Jeremiah 31:15
On Aug. 27, a young man fired through the stained glass windows of a Catholic church in Minnesota as a school full of children worshipped inside. He killed two of them, ages eight and 10, and injured many more. When his rampage was through, he killed himself.
According to the statistics website ballotpedia.org, this was the 838th K-12 school shooting since the year 1990. More than 538 children have been killed and over 1,000 injured in these incidents.
As is our national tradition, the blame and political analysis began before the next of kin could be notified of their children’s deaths. Who was the shooter? What were his political affiliations? Did he have a manifesto? A YouTube channel? Did he get his weapons legally? Rumors began to fly: He hated Jews. He was a transwoman. He was a Republican. No, a Democrat. Pundits and online readers began, for the 838th time, to argue about gun control and mental illness and ‘thoughts and prayers.’ Politicians stood in front of seas of news cameras and cried or forcefully drove home their positions.
Meanwhile, shattered glass had not even been swept up from the floor of an empty church. Children’s beds were left unmade, never to be slept in again. Laundry will need to be washed, tossed aside by little ones who will no longer wear it. Parents whose planners were full of sports practices and dentist appointments will cancel everything. There is only one event left for the school year: a funeral.
The Catholic faith, my faith, the faith of those slain little ones, says this: “Endowed with a spiritual soul, with intellect and with free will, the human person is from his very conception ordered to God and destined for eternal beatitude.”
Each of us, from the first moment of our existence, is a miracle. We are unfathomably important, lovingly handcrafted by an omnipotent Creator God and bound for eternity. We are irreplaceable. When we leave this Earth, there will never, ever, be another individual exactly like us. We cannot even begin to comprehend how the death of just one person affects the trajectory of the world at large — the potential unfulfilled, the creative powers stifled, the good left undone, the relationships severed. But we can understand through grief. When we look at a mother who has lost a child, we can feel how important one soul is. When we attend a funeral and hear the mourners speak of the one who has died, we can get a sense of the power that one individual has over the world.
As a nation, we do not grieve. We blame. We analyze. We question and gossip. We argue. We legislate. But we do not leave time, not even a few hours, to mourn an irreplaceable soul ripped from the Earth. We’re too busy combing YouTube for secret manifestos or shoehorning tragedy into our preferred political platform. Very few of us remember the name or life story of a victim of school shootings. But almost all of us have a mental list of the ways we would prevent this horror from happening again. Never mind no one’s asking. We have all the correct opinions, all the right answers.
Leaving room for grief before firing up the rage machine is not a concession to trite “thoughts and prayers.” Real thoughts and real prayers are the only important contribution most of us can make. Putting mourning first focuses on the dignity and irreplaceability of the person who has died, the enormity of the loss, and the evil of “the direct destruction of an innocent human being.” These three concepts must be centered if we are ever to find a “solution” to school shootings. As those children’s Catholic faith proclaims, “A just society can become a reality only when it is based on the respect of the transcendent dignity of the human person.”
Two innocent children were murdered on Wednesday, August 27. They will live forever, but they will never be here again. A tragedy like that deserves, demands, that we stop bickering for at least a little while and listen quietly to the grief that envelops our nation once again.
“And the Lord said, ‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!’” — Genesis 4:10
Liz Schleicher, a member of St. Vincent de Paul Parish of Pettis County, lives in Green Ridge and is a wife, stay-at-home mother, writer and rare cancer survivor. She is a regularly contributing columnist to the Sedalia Democrat newspaper (sedaliademocrat.com), which originally published this column on Aug. 28. It is published here with permission.
