When Assessing Blame, Look Inside

We gather again in the churches of Littleton, Colo., as we have done previously in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Kentucky, to express our pain, confusion and anger at the slaying and wounding of innocents by the juvenile assassins in our midst.

We have many questions in our minds and hearts at this tragic hour. The first of them is, how did the Almighty allow this to happen? Why wouldn’t a compassionate and omnipotent God program the victims to be in a different place, or jam the killing instrument? If God could rescue the ancient Hebrews at the Red Sea, why didn’t he deliver these children from their sea of red blood?

As understandable as is that question, it is the wrong question. Sacred Scripture has instructed that God bestows upon humans the freedom of choice--Adam and Eve chose to eat the apple and suffer the consequences. In the words of Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” “If we are not free to choose evil, then we are not free to choose good either.” That God-given freedom to be human will yield a Mother Teresa and a Hitler, a child scholar and a child assassin. It is human choice that has created this plague of killer children, not God. And, no doubt, God was there in the terrible moment as innocent children bled. Elie Wiesel contends that at Auschwitz, God was in the smokestacks, suffering with the agony of the victims.

We might also ask what could we as parents and citizens have done differently to avoid this outcome. In an episode of the TV show, “The Practice,” an adolescent boy is arrested for shooting his mother. The judge must decide whether to try him as a child or adult. As the lawyers present their respective arguments, the judge interrupts and cuts to the core: “There are many expert theories explaining why this happened. The real reason is that he got angry and a gun was handy.”

In our towns, too, these young children get angry and a gun is handy. Their acting out their anger rather than subduing it is what we have taught them by example, in more prosaic matters. How many of us pride ourselves in “telling it like it is” and “letting it all hang out?” Those two phrases are like American mantras. It is the animal and not the god within us who lets it all hang out. That is why animals defecate in the street. Humans, though, are “a little less than the angels.” We restrain our anger in imitation of the the Almighty, “whose compassion overwhelms his wrath.” To hold it in, not hang it out, is civilized.

How can we repent so that other American towns will not have to go through this nightmare again? First, confession. We must renounce the desirability and ease with which many of us embrace guns as if they were adult teddy bears. I know that the Constitution allows us to bear arms. But it also allows us to pursue life, liberty and happiness, which are being eroded because of our absolutist understanding of a constitutional right written for another time and place.

Where do we go from here? How can we find consolation while the bodies of our youngest lie in their fresh graves?

Kushner quotes Dorothee Soelle, author of “Suffering,” who suggests that the religious question now is not, “Where does suffering come from?” but, “Where does it lead?” She speaks of “the devil’s martyrs.” They are the opposite of religious martyrs, who die in such a way as to bear witness to their faith. The forces of despair and disbelief have their martyrs, too, people whose death weakens others people’s faith in God and in his world.

It is in our reaction to these events, that we make their deaths witnesses for either the god or the devil. If we continue as before, then the devil has prevailed. If because of what has transpired we learn to look to ourselves and not God, to melt down both our guns and the smaller acts of violence between us, then the death of these children and even the warped minds of their killers become witnesses for God.