The blame game...

The bodies had hardly been cared for and families notified before the blame game for the shootings at Virgina Tech was already underway. An army of reporters and pundits, all of whom had not being there and not being aware of the situation in common, descended on the University to get thier thirty second sound bite and try to sound on top of things by questioning the response of the people who were actually there and trying to make a difference. Next the politicians will come and soon after them, if they're not already there, will be a school of lawyers attracted by the smell of blood.

The European press is talking about America's gun control laws while ignoring thier own bloody past and the whole idea that a maniac would take the time to make sure he had all the paperwork in order before going on a rampage. People are asking for the President of the University to be fired as if he should have been omniscient and able to know every bit of the future and protect every person on campus by himself. People are looking for someone to blame, some structure, some program, some group, or maybe just one person but the truth is right in the faces we see in the mirror every day.

We have given up as unfashionable the idea that evil exists and that in every human and every group of humans there is a dark part that can overwhelm us sometimes without our even seeing it. Sometimes that evil emerges horrendously like shooting rampages or wars but most often it's just a silent killer lurking underneath all of our skins killing us slowly every time we give in to it. And we'd like to think we can master it, subject it to some superior system of management, to a better environment, or a more perfect structure. But it never seems to work and having long ago given up looking at the content of our souls for answers we look for someone, anyone, to blame.

But the shooting is about us, that part of us that is dark and foreboding and full of unholy trash accumulated over the years. Without the resources to fight it its just a matter of time before it, like a deep infection, finds its way to the skin of our life as a boil. There are many ways this happens but only one source and until we deal with that we'll all find ourselves at that moment in our life when one way or another we stand faced with the choice to pull our own particular trigger and we do.

No law, no structure, no environment, or program, as good as they can be, will change a thing until the inside of a person is redirected away from darkness and towards the Light. We are not mindless beings subject to the whims of our environment but embodied souls with the capacity to transcend and when we fail to do so the results are always tragic even if there isn't 24 hour press coverage of the results. A man can have access to a hundred guns but if his heart is turned away from killing there will be no death. And the same is true for whatever darkness we shelter and nourish in the secret part of our hearts.

This is why who we are and what we seek to be as Christians matters, because at the heart of our faith lived in this world is a desire to be transformed deeply and truly from what we are to what we by grace can become. Each act of repentance is not merely a response to a past embrace of darkness but also a positive act for the betterment of our selves and the world. A person who renounces killing saves thier soul but also saves the world from whatever harm could have been done by virtue of their forsaken murders. And so it is with all sins and struggles and moments of dark despair not embraced in the pursuit of the Savior.

Yet what has happened in these past hours cannot be undone and so we are left with another reminder of the savage that lies within us all and the call to care as best we can for those who suffered from its manifestation at Virginia Tech. Some day the world, and we ourselves, will not be this way and so we urge our Lord to come and return heaven to earth and make all things new. And as we do we hope ourselves, in some small way, to be continually be made new from the very core of our being for as long as we live here in hope.