Who hasn’t had something to say about the recent school shooting atrocity in Newtown, Connecticut? Here, however, are five observations on my part concerning perspectives, most of which I haven’t seen previously addressed.
1. The noun “tragedy” and the adjective” tragic” are over-used these days. At least according to how the ancient Greek philosopher and drama critic, Aristotle, defined the terms in his Poetics (c. 335 B.C.E.).
Accordingly, most “tragic” things are “bad”; but not all “bad” things are “tragic.”
The random killing of innocent children and teachers/administrators in an elementary school is, of course, terrible beyond comprehension. But how might it be understood as “tragic”?
Imagine, at best, the following scenario:
A worried mother taking her developmentally disabled young adult son to a shooting range to fire weapons–even of the “assault” kind–as a way of trying to “connect” with/”relate” to him in a seemingly harmless activity (however violent)? Or perhaps her reasoning that such an activity would be therapeutic for him in terms of his expressing, in a way meant to hurt no one, a possible tendency toward unimagined violence?
Hardly thinking that one so emotionally and socially isolated would one day steal those same weapons to use in murdering her and others.
Since what is “tragic,” according to Aristotle, is when something “good” can also be just as “bad.” As in the characterization of the prototype, the ancient Greek hero, Oedipus.
Another dimension of Aristotle’s definition of “tragic” is what is commonly referred to as a “double-bind.” That’s when one’s choices in life get reduced to “bad” or “worse.” As in the circumstances of the ancient Greek heroine, Antigone.
There are those, of course, who see the owning and shooting of guns–of any kind–in this latter way. As only, at best, the “lesser of evils.”
Whereas others would see gun owning and shooting as “tragic” in the former sense. As something “good,” or at least not something “bad” (duck hunting? even protecting oneself or family from being murdered?) that can also be expressed in the “worst” of ways.
[For a further discussion of “tragedy” cf. my book, Balanced Living: Don’t Let Your Strength Become Your Weakness (Wipf and Stock, 2009), pp. 41-44.]
2. It appears that those who consider themselves the most “conservative”–politically and religiously–are also those who seem most defensive with respect to any suggestion concerning the minimizing of gun production, sales and use.
Typically, we speak of “stewardship”–at least among religious folk–as having to do with how we “spend” our money. But I’m remembering the late Reverend William Sloane Coffin claiming that there is also a “stewardship” to how we “earn” our money.
If that is so, does such “stewardship” not apply to the producing, selling and buying of (at least certain kinds of) weaponry? How money is “made” and “spent.”
How often have, again, those who would consider themselves the most “conservative”–politically and religiously–tried to reason with their children, with respect to any number of ethical or moral considerations: just because you “can,” does that necessarily mean you “should”?
Does this same ethical/moral principle not also apply to the producing, selling and buying of (at least certain kinds of) guns?
3. When one reads the Second Amendment to our nation’s Constitution, the context for the “right” to “keep and bear arms” is, it would seem, important. Context–pertaining to almost anything–usually is.
The Second Amendment “context” has to do with a fledgling nation’s need to possibly assemble a “militia.” It doesn’t affirm the “right” to “keep and bear arms” in the context of “hunting” for the sake of “sport,” or–even in the late 18th/early 19th century–to obtain food. Nor does the Second Amendment’s “context” refer to the protecting of one’s personal or family safety. Not that these latter examples aren’t acceptable reasons for owning and even necessarily shooting a gun.
Since it’s the self-proclaimed “strict contructionists” who claim to interpret the Constitution most closely in relation to its original “context,” is the culture of American life today–certainly where guns are concerned–not notably different from when the Second Amendment was originally ratified?
4. In his best-selling book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (Crown Publishers, 1999), one of noted authority on the subject, Dr. John Gottman’s “principles” is “Solve Your Solvable Problems.”
This “principle” strikes me as applicable to the polarizing argument these days concerning “gun control”; unfortunately, an argument which seems to have been reduced to only “all right” or “all wrong” either/or alternatives. The result? A stand-off. And whenever this is the consequence–whether in a marriage, our nation’s public life, or anywhere else–because we “can’t solve the whole problem,” it’s too easy to conclude that we “can’t solve any of it.”
So here’s another analogy–as strained as it may be. If there is any hope for curbing what some these days would term “Muslim violent extremism,” it will likely come from reasonable Muslims around the world who are able to use their influence in minimizing, if not neutralizing such extremist violence.
Likewise, on the part of–hopefully–a majority of reasonable, responsible “gun lovers, owners and users.” Those who will use their influence to work toward at least some form of “gun control.” A principle, indeed, that is as much in their own best interest as in that of folk like me for whom gun owning and using is an aversion.
5. President Obama’s televised remarks at a memorial service following the unconscionable murdering of any of Sandy Hook Elementary School’s first-graders, teachers and administrators: they were, in my judgment, genuinely and appropriately sympathetic and comforting. Gathering up in his words, as he did, a nation’s shock and grief at such horror.
Except, as I heard it, one of his statements–as well-meaning as it was surely intended–it reflected a theology I would question. It is a statement often heard in such circumstances. In referring to those who had died, the President said: “God took them.”
Which is different from declaring that, even in death, one’s life is never separated from that love who God is. At least from a Christian way of believing. And if our President is anything, he is clearly a committed Christian.
Not that he would have the theological training to understand the (subtle or not so) implications of a “God took her/him” statement. One would, however, think that at least one of the President’s speech writers might have such discernment.
Put bluntly and in the most skeptical, even cynical of ways–out of which far too many have drawn an unfortunate, if not tragic conclusion–what kind of God “takes” anyone, much less innocent children, “out of” the “living” for which they have been created? Certainly not the God of the Bible who is revealed as, ultimately, the source of “life” (Deuteronomy 30: 19, John 10:10).
When my primary care physician’s 86-year-old mother died, recently, I asked him if she had been ill, perhaps terminally. He explained otherwise. He said that she had lived vitally until the day she died. And later, he offered a “medical explanation” for the cause of her death. But before offering that explanation, he said: “God took her.”
Which might be a comforting way to think of someone her age dying. In many years of pastoral ministry, I have often had elderly, infirmed, particularly terminally ill persons ask me if it was OK to “pray to die.” And I have assured them that it was, that–in some circumstances–“death” can be a “good gift.”
That is hardly, however, how I would interpret the “dying” of a child, adolescent or adult so thoroughly engaged in living whose life has been, in likely whatever circumstances, “ended”: that “God took her/him.”
I would interpret, rather, that in the face of such death, “God’s heart is the first to break.” When my friend’s wife died, suddenly, at an untimely age, he later told me that when the minister at her funeral offered that same interpretation of her death: how he found such an observation the most comforting of anything anyone said to him in his grieving.
Such an understanding reflects, of course, a fairly mature “faith”–Christian or otherwise. That our lives rest in that “loving presence” who is God–in our living and dying. That there is an unfathomable connection between God’s strength and God’s suffering, between God’s own vulnerability and God’s power–indeed the “power” of a way of loving who is God–that never ends.
Not that such a conviction is likely understandable, if comforting or otherwise, to children; or even to a grieving parent or other loved one who has “lost” whomever, much less a child. Whatever comfort there is to be found in such awful circumstances remains, I suspect, to be dis-covered or un-covered in a grieving, in whatever way or other, that likely never ends–at least in this life.
In the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus’ friend, Lazarus, has died. And Jesus’ response is anything but the kind of pious platitudes which too often characterize the most well-meaning of efforts to comfort those who are grieving. Nor does Jesus attempt to, if you will, “defend God’s omniscience.” Instead, the Bible says (John 11: 35): “Jesus wept.”
What I am so inadequately suggesting–in the face of a “loss” that “breaks God’s own heart”–whatever its worth, it is at least not a “God took her/him” theology.
