What Can You Say?
This is the first blog I have written since Easter. I managed to resist the Imus uproar (although, for the record, I am glad he was fired and only regret that it took corporate America so long to find their conscience…. seems they left it in their wallets). Now of course, every thoughtful clergyperson is spinning gears frantically trying to explain why a good God could allow such evil. However, that is not the topic of this reflection.
What I am concerned about here is the common humanity we share. If we share vicariously in Jesus’ death and resurrection; If we bear each other’s joys and sorrows; If we are able to say, “There but by the grace of God…” Then we know that the horrible, unimaginable evil that coursed through Cho Seung-hui mind and body is not so far away from us. It is easy to blame God. It is still easier to point out the deficiencies of religious explanations. It is easy to be angry at Cho Seung-hui and at dangerously misguided gun legislation and the incompetence of authorities.
But all of these standard and understandable responses only help to deflect direct apprehension of the proximity of evil to our human condition. Just as Jesus was ‘one of us,’ so too was Cho Seung-hui one of us. Not that we should worship the gunman, but we should recognize he ate with us, he drank with us, he breathed the same air and walked on the same ground. He had a human mother and father and he survived a long time trying to fit in.
I know that what I am saying is upsetting. But as long as we choose to see these incarnations of evil as some kind of alien aberration, we miss a chance to understand something important about ourselves. In our deep sadness, in our moral outrage, in our God-blaming cries for deliverance, we need to understand that the evil is not just out there. We all participate; we are all in need of healing and redemption. We all have plenty of the primitive extant in our souls. I John says, “If we say we have no sin, the truth is not in us.”
In our shock and horror (and believe me, I feel as raw and vulnerable and angry as anybody short of those immediately impacted), I hope that we will not choose to see evil as exclusively someone else’s problem. I hope that we will not simply look for better laws and tighter security (which I believe we need). But my hope is that we can use our shock and outrage to learn something profound about ourselves, our world and what it might really take to find redemption. It certainly won’t come from denial, disowning and projecting the problem out there.
More needs to be said, so I hope you will feel free to write your thoughts and opinions, to either challenge or develop the above. I sense that a lot of us need to talk and share a lot more.
