Making Sense of the Senseless

Twenty one years ago, I was on a college spring break service trip to Jonestown, Mississippi, when the evil of gun violence made itself known to me up close.

Working with Habitat for Humanity, I was one of a group of about 12 students from Northwestern's Sheil Catholic Center who drove down to this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, poverty-stricken town outside Memphis to help build homes for residents, grow in fellowship and friendship with one another, and maybe even get the girl I was crushing on to notice me. (There seemed to be an unwritten rule that I would fall in unrequited love with someone on every college service trip, but that's another topic for another day.)

This was my first service trip and the first time that I was immersed in a community of such poverty. Along with that poverty came numerous other social problems including unemployment, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, gang activity, gun violence, and more.

On the second day of our week-long trip—a Sunday—we drove to a larger nearby city to buy groceries for all the dinners we would make for ourselves in the Habitat volunteer house where we were staying. As we drove back to the house—probably debating whether or not we had secured enough E.L. Fudge to last for the duration of the trip—we noticed numerous police squad cars screaming past us on the highway. They were all headed for Jonestown.

When we got back to the town, our street was blocked by police cars. Something was wrong.

We parked our 12-passenger van on another street and walked past the police cars to get to our house.

I'll never forget what I saw next.

The house directly across the street from ours was cordoned off with yellow police tape. Evidence tags were scattered across the driveway, marking the location of bullet shells.

A man's lifeless body lay in the driveway, covered completely by a white sheet. One of his gym shoes was next to him, somehow displaced by the violence of the moment.

I immediately felt sick to my stomach and lightheaded. This was not death faced in the serenity of a funeral home and an open casket. This was murder. This was premeditated intent to kill.

The young man in the driveway had been alive when we left for the grocery store, but now he was dead. It was Sunday. If we hadn't gone for groceries, we would have been there when the drug-related drive-by shooting occurred, maybe even outside when it happened.

Words fail in the face of hatred and fear that manifest as death and destruction.

Fast forward to yesterday.

I'm coincidentally back in Memphis for a work event when gun violence once again got personal. While I have no direct connections to anyone involved in the Minneapolis school shooting and it is tragically not an isolated incident of school gun violence, this one feels more personal because I am Catholic and because I have children in a Catholic school, some of whom are the same age as the children who were senselessly killed in the attack.

This shooting is more complicated to process than other school shootings precisely because of the Catholicism of it all. Students being shot in their classrooms is a tragedy beyond comprehension. Students being slaughtered at a Catholic school Mass has the added layer of being both a tragedy and a hate crime.

The motive is still being deciphered, but the targeting of the Catholic school the shooter attended could not have been random.

The responses have been different, too. After other school shootings (what a tragic phrase to have to pluralize), the agreed upon acceptable social media response post states that thoughts and prayers aren't enough—action and legislation are required to stem these incidents at their source.

This time around, those dismissing prayer are being dismissed by some Catholics for their lack of faith.

But none of this changes the fact that two young children were alive when their parents dropped them off for school, and now they are dead. Lord, have mercy.

Ever since The Dark Knight movie theater shootings, there has rarely been a public event or gathering that I have attended where the thought of an active shooter hasn't briefly crossed my mind.

I think about it with my own kids often. There is a helplessness in sending them to school, a supposedly safe space where in reality so many children have been killed so randomly for decades now. If it happened at my children’s school, I have no power to affect the outcome. I can only pray that my children would remain safe, which doesn't take away the fact that someone else's children would probably still be harmed in that scenario. It's unimaginable.

Before heading to the airport this morning, I attended daily Mass with a coworker. We were a couple minutes late for Mass and the front doors of the church were locked, even though Mass had just started.

When we entered through the side door, we saw this was in fact a school Mass. The scene was probably similar to yesterday morning in Minneapolis. The pews were brimming with K through 8th graders in uniform and students doing readings, serving Mass, and singing in the choir. A young lector finished reading the responsorial psalm and came to sit in the pew in front of us where her father had just sat down. She threw her arms around him and hugged him tightly for the rest of the Liturgy of the Word.

As the priest read today's Gospel about how we "do not know the hour" and must always be prepared, I thought about the locked front doors of the Church and the teacher sitting in the pew across from me with a walkie-talkie next to her, at the ready. I don't think this is exactly what Jesus was talking about, but they are prepared.

When evil surrounds us and feels as if it is all-consuming, the Catholic faith has the answers we need—even when they are not the answers we necessarily want to hear or can easily live out.

Ordinarily, it is my instinct to be immediately repulsed by the perpetrator of such an act, condemning them in my mind and thinking about the fury I would have as a grieving parent in that situation. This person is an evil monster and their motives are incomprehensible to me.

These feelings are raw and relatable. They are the human response to an inhuman act.

After hearing the news yesterday, I was mourning the martyred students and trying to make sense of this latest atrocity in my mind when I suddenly had an unsolicited thought about the shooter that stopped me in my tracks.

Jesus was hanging on the cross for this person.

I don’t even like typing this.

God loves the shooter as much as He loves you. As much as He loves the students who were injured and the students who were killed. Just as He is welcoming those martyred children into heaven, He is mourning the choices made by the troubled soul who didn’t understand the depth of His love and felt no choice but to embrace the sinful, evil path that led to this tragedy.

That is a hard truth that makes no sense to our own broken, human minds.

That is also the greatest conundrum of our faith, while also being our greatest hope. God’s reckless love for us will not waver, no matter who we are or what we’ve done.

He will comfort our grieving hearts. He will rejoice in our daily conversions. He will give us the strength and confidence we need to share His love with others so fewer souls will become lost and the lost sheep might return.

We are not able to comprehend so much of what happens in this world. We can’t control the decisions and actions of others. In moments like this, all we can do is lean into the love of the Father to receive a peace that surpasses all understanding.

That’s what I’m praying for while I hug my children even tighter tonight—and I remember that God is holding each of us the same way.