When I was in second grade there was a school shooting at an
elementary school in my town. 5 kindergarten students and a teacher were
killed, 29 students were injured. At the time I didn’t know the details, my
parents were careful to shield me from these gruesome and terrible events.
However, I do remember the beginnings of “stranger danger” shortly after. Along
with fire drills and earthquake drills we started doing “intruder drills”.
During these new drills our teachers would turn the lights off in our
classrooms and tape paper to the windows in the doors. We were told to sit
quietly while the teachers and staff practiced checking the school grounds for
any adults who didn’t belong there. I am sure this gave comfort to many of the
parents of students at my school and perhaps even to some of the students.
However, I experienced a sense of foreboding. A place that was once safe began
to feel uncertain. As we began to talk about the dangers of strangers it was
not only school that didn’t feel safe but also the whole world. There were
strangers everywhere! I would shy away from people I didn’t know even when my
parents were around to assure me everything was ok.
I was in high school when the shootings at Columbine High
School happened. This time I was old enough to be fully aware and informed of
the details of this tragic event. We talked about it at home, at church and in
school. I remember sitting in a crowded and noisy school hallway and feeling
utterly and helplessly isolated and alone. The walls were closing in. It was
not simply strangers that were the problem; my own peers were dangerous
suddenly. What could cause such violence in people my age?
This past Friday, when I logged onto Facebook for a quick
distraction while I waited for a program at work to load, I was once again
faced with a staggering grief and confusion that was too heavy to bear. I scrolled
through post after post and then news article after news article about one of
the most heinous and disturbing crimes I have ever read about. Mostly Friday is
a blur for me. I felt like I was tumbling through darkness reaching my hands
out to grasp something solid to hold myself up with or lean against but the
more I scrambled the less sturdy I felt. I tried to work but continually found
myself sitting at my desk staring blankly into space trying to make room in my
mind for this new reality in which a young man would choose to kill his mother
and many, many young students in her school before killing himself.
I still do not know what this means or how to appropriately
respond to it. I hardly know what or how to pray for the victims and their families or for the young man who committed this crime and his family. I have opinions about gun control and the state of mental
healthcare in the United States, certainly, but more than anything I kept
thinking about the fact that we are in the middle of Advent, that we are
practicing waiting with joyful anticipation for Christ the baby. On Friday this
just felt like too ridiculous a juxtaposition. How can a baby be strong to
enough to bear the enormity of this pain and anger? How can we be hoping for a
baby when what we need is a champion? I wanted to laugh or cry at the
impossibility of Christmas and the longing instead for Good Friday.
As I have continued to process the events of Friday, though,
I have begun to think about Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32 and about
David and his Psalms of lamentation, such as Psalm 88. In all of the ugliness
of this world perhaps one of the most profound graces is that God is big enough
to take all our anger and frustration, our pain and our grief and wrestle with
us. God does not respond by telling us to come back when we’ve calmed down and
are ready to have a rational conversation. God does not insist on holding us
and rocking us until all our tears are spent, though certainly this is offered.
God meets us in the ring and wrestles with us. God is also not a bully that
smacks us down in the ring to show us how much weaker and smaller we are. God
will wrestle with us for as long as we need to wrestle. We can scream and cry
and spit and kick and God does not shy away or reprimand us. No, God wrestles.
And I have needed to wrestle this weekend. I am still
wrestling. But I am also deeply comforted to know Jesus the man pleading in the
Garden of Gethsemane, to know that sometimes this world was also too big for
him, that some burdens felt too heavy for him to bear. Jesus wrestled too. It
may seem cheap or simple right now to find solace in a savior who knows what it
is to fear, to grieve, to face uncertainty but I have come back to that
knowledge over and over again and from it found reassurance in his tender and
generous love for me and for all. So I will continue to wrestle. And in the
next week I will hold onto a hope that by the time Christmas comes this year I may have let go of some of the weight of this past week and be able to
celebrate the beauty of the vulnerable Christ child who is helpless for his
mother, as we all have been and still are sometimes.
