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Virginia Tech: Finding Immanuel in the Midst of Tragedy
It's been more than a week since the Virginia Tech massacre, but the pain is still fresh. How do we handle this in light of the truth that God is in this with us?
What Do We Do Now?
More than a week ago, we all got the news of the horrific, almost unthinkable shooting at Virginia Tech.
And a week later, there is, in a sense, little to say about the massacre. People at my own campus, a few hours away from Virginia Tech were and are speechless; I do not dare imagine how people in Blacksburg feel. And it is not just Blacksburg, of course. People remain connected to their college wherever they go after graduation. There are parents, friends and alumni all over Virginia, all over the nation, who were personally affected by last week's shooting.
There is not much one can say.
And yet, during this last week, I have had some interesting conversations. A friend who works very high up in university administration at a school not wholly dissimilar from Virginia Tech confessed to me that he was perplexed and upset — what could his school do to protect students, really? Dismiss anyone who seemed mentally unbalanced or who had a criminal background? And if a school did dismiss students who had some history of either crime or mental unbalance … well, that might make the school safer, but it wouldn't necessarily make society any safer. Indeed, said my university administrator friend, pushing an unbalanced person out of school might also push him over the brink.
I have had a conversation with a professor of religious studies, who sees in Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui a perverse lesson about the ways cultural understandings of martyrdom have changed over time. Once upon a time, people who were martyred for a cause simply allowed themselves to be killed. Now, self-styled martyrs kill other people first.
I had a conversation with a student who finds herself in the grip of terrible anxiety attacks — what's to say one of her hallmates won't also prove to be a killer? How can she feel safe here? Or anywhere?
I have seen students at my own school make a simple, yet embodied, gesture of solidarity, clothing themselves in orange and cranberry and draping Hokie scarves around their necks. These simple gestures remind me of the church's long history of bereaved people wearing mourning garb, from black clothes to veils to armbands to jet black jewelry, worn to signal to the world that they were bereaved, and worn to connect the wearer to the dead they mourned.
At my school this week, people are still shell-shocked. It's an odd juxtaposition — reading week, the hectic flurry to get prepared for final exams, the all-nighters to get those 20-page term papers written, the exuberant anticipation of graduation and summertime. All of it shadowed by death, by grief and by uncertainty.
Lean on Me
I have been teaching a class on Christian practices of death and dying this semester; one of the things my students have noted is that so often, what we say in the face of death is, if well-meaning, banal and actually hurtful.
"Your best friend, the one who was just killed in a drunk driving accident, well now she's singing with the heavenly choir, man, singing with the heavenly choir." (Or, worse, the words I was instructed not to say to a grieving parent the summer I worked in hospital chaplaincy, "God took your child because God needed another angel." I hope no one has said such insulting idiocy to a parent of a student who died at Virginia Tech.) Sometimes the best thing to say after grief or tragedy is nothing — to offer a ministry of prayer and presence, not a ministry of words.
Still, there are some things that we as Christians can say to one another about such devastating tragedy. We can say that we have seen, in terrifying starkness, a picture of our human interdependence on one another. Virginia Tech has offered us, in other words, a gruesome glimpse of something we often speak of as a virtue in the Christian life — our reliance on one another. Our community.
The contemporary church talks a lot about community. We crave it, and we recognize that the Christian grammar places us ineluctably in community. Yet, usually when we speak of community, of needing one another, we mean something warm and fuzzy, something nice — we mean not feeling so isolated — having real truth-telling intimacy with our brothers and sisters in Christ. But community bonds are not always pleasant.
The Scriptural insistence that we are a body, that we depend on one another the way our liver and eyes depend on our capillaries and arteries, becomes tragically clear when someone picks up a gun and shoots his classmates. This is the terrifying, fragile part of being interdependent in a world marred by sin — our community, quite simply, is vulnerable. It turns out that we depend on one another in the most basic, essential ways — we depend on one another's willingness not to do violence.
Of course, even beyond and beneath and before our dependence on one another is our dependence on God, without whose active loving sustenance even Creation would cease to exist. At its best, our dependence on one another becomes an icon through which we can see our dependence on God.
God With Us
In July of 1999, I happened to be at a hotel in that posh Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead the day Mark Barton burst into two Atlanta office buildings and, in the worst mass shooting in the city's history, killed nine people. That Sunday, I found myself at a downtown church, one I'd never attended before. I don't remember much of what happened that Sunday morning. I do remember, very clearly, what the preacher said from the pulpit:
"People want to know where God was when that shooter gunned down all those people in Buckhead," he said. People want to know, in other words, why evil happens, and why God allows us to do terrible things. The preacher didn't answer the question of why evil happens. Instead, he turned the question around, and answered a slightly different one: "Where was God when those shootings happened?" he asked. "God was lying bleeding next to the victims. God was suffering with them, as God always suffers with us."
It is our tendency, in the midst of a tragedy, to feel abandoned by God — and those feelings are understandable. It is one thing to name God Immanuel, God with us, during the happy Christmas season. It is another to insist that God is Immanuel, God with us, when the world feels its most lawless, its most dangerous, its most insane, its most frightening, its most unjust.
C O F F E E S H O PBut the truth is God never abandons the suffering, the bleeding, the dying, the bereaved. Our God who mourned His friend Lazarus, and who was killed in a violent, unjust death, is truly the God of compassion — not simply God with us, but the God who suffers with us.
Where was God last week when a killer terrorized Virginia Tech? He was, and is, there suffering alongside those who were killed, those who are frightened, and those who remain to mourn.
Lauren Winner is an author whose books include, Girl Meets God, Mudhouse Sabbath, and Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity (read Lindy Keffer's review). She is currently working on a doctorate in the history of American religion. Lauren does not have a TV, so she entertains herself by reading and hanging out with her husband.
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