Virginia Tech

Angels descending, bring from above echoes of mercy, whispers of love.
– Blessed Assurance, Fanny Crosby, 1873

Three days have passed since the murders of 32 people at Virginia Tech. Several times I have sought to put fingers to keyboard to share some thoughts about that awful day and several times I have moved on to other things unsure what I wanted to share. This morning, as I was preparing Sunday’s service bulletin, the words above start to shape my thoughts into some sense of order.

As I listened to them on the mp3 I was reviewing for the service, I was able to visualize those 32 lives ended too soon, as their shattered bodies breathed their last, the souls rising up to be embraced in mercy and love by a power greater than ourselves. For me, there is some comfort in that image.

The words come from the second verse of the hymn “Blessed Assurance“, written by Fanny Crosby to a tune written by another member of her church, Phoebe Knapp who wrote over 500 hymn tunes in her time. Fanny Crosby wrote some 8,000 hymns during her life, more than any known composer. She was also blind from a very early age.

Sitting hundreds of miles away from that scene, which has been repeatedly brought into my home through the TV and the internet, it is almost unimaginable what impact the actions this young person has imposed on the lives of the survivors and their families. For the survivors the broadcasting of both his image and voice (which few had ever heard) has to be just wrenching.

I remember vividly I was just around their age when I was the victim of an armed holdup by a person wearing a balaclava. Just 2-3 days later I went to answer the door of the house and looked through the peephole to see someone standing there in a balaclava (it was a bitterly cold January day).

I’ve never forgotten the spasm of fear that shot through me. While that was an event with a threat of violence attached, it was nowhere near the cold blooded terror or horror that survivors would be associating with the image of this shooter. Local papers near Virginia Tech have not prominently carried photos of the shooter, although with the massive coverage this has received, they can’t really be avoided.

The story of the class of the Canadian teacher, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, brought into sharp focus just how determined, methodical and devoid of any sense of conscience the shooter had to have been. Of the 22 students registered in her class, it appears 12 were in attendance on Monday, only two have survived. It is also the classroom where the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, finally, mercifully ended his killing spree by killing himself.

Unless you have walked in the depths of darkness that a deeply depressed, suicidal person has walked it is difficult to even begin to remotely comprehend what drives the painful desire to commit suicide. Even those who have walked there, will struggle to even begin to comprehend what drove those thoughts and feelings to morph into the drive to not only destroy himself but to take dozens of other strangers with him. It’s mind numbing.

I find a lesson to learn from this, there are probably umpteen lessons to learn but this one we can all put to use. Once again, the bits and pieces of information that have come from this shooter while not particularly coherent or articulate it is not hard to see the voice of a person who has experienced bullying. That in no way is an excuse for him any more than having been abused is an excuse for a pedophile to abuse children.

It does remind us in the starkest of terms that those people who you see as on the fringes, or different, or ‘weird’ do have feelings, they feel the hurt of being teased, shunned or bullied. When it goes on too long and the mind snaps the multitude of little hurts contribute to the stark horrors of what was experienced at Virginia Tech and that pain wont go away any time soon.

If I pause for a moment to be kind to someone I might have previously been less kind with, I’ll never know if I made a difference to that person, but I will know I will have not added to a burden of hurt for another person.

Let’s bring from ourselves “echoes of mercy, whispers of love”.