Coventry Carol and Sandy Hook

When I heard the news of the Connecticut school shootings, I posted on Facebook that my unedited emotional reaction was laced with profanity. I thought most about those poor families who have to face Christmas without their children, or with traumatized children----not to mention the law enforcement personnel who saw awful things.  

Then I thought: although anger and outrage are human responses to such news----including those of us (like me) who could scarcely hurt a fly----our society is so filled with rage. Among other religious groups, we Christians can model harmony and good-will and ministry to one another----but we don't always. I’ve known so many angry Christians over the years. I get loud-angry, too, about things I perceive as political and social hypocrisy. I don't mean to turn these thoughts into a political statement. But we're in a very angry time, with outbursts of violence, perhaps the worst since the 1960s and early 1970s, though the violence is expressed in different ways than back then. As we feel honest indignation and sorrow, we need to pray urgently for the healing of those families, that town, and our country on several levels---and to ask God to help us clarify whether anger motivates our own hearts.     

Guns are "the elephant in the room" in our national conversation, as a news commentator put it earlier (what little TV news I could stand to watch). I also think that suitable access to mental health care is another major challenge that we need to keep discussing nationally----and how to pay for such care, in our current situation of a high national deficit and other economic challenges. But we also need a lowering of the national temperature, so to speak, a sense that we're all in this together. Tragedies such as this tend to pull us together---but that "togetherness" is so short-lived, it seems. I'm ashamed that I'm starting to think, "oh, another public shooting," when I hear the news---they're happening so frequently lately. Today's shooting, though, was so horrible. 

Only a tiny minority of people will take out their rage against others with weapons, and perhaps that’s a sign that God’s mysterious providence is holding back a hideous tide of those whom I was earlier calling [expletive] idiots, out to harm others because of their private anguish and evil. My religious Facebook friends are calling upon God for mercy and healing, and I know this will be addressed in prayer services and upcoming religious services around the country. My non-religious Facebook friends are also calling for national healing and reasoned, suitable solutions.  

I saw that someone posted this website, of helpful and unhelpful things to say to children (and others) in such a circumstance: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-emily-c-heath/dealing-with-grief-five-t_b_2303910.html

My mind turned (in honest anger toward God) to the story of the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew 2. Why would God (assuming the historicity of the story) allow babies to be killed, by a despot reacting to Jesus’ birth? Christ's birth resulted in an orgy of horror? The gospel author didn’t disguise the fact that horrible things do happen under the watch of a good and loving Lord, who sends his son to be born in a something terrible world. The hard questions are raised and left open in the gospel narrative. 

In turn, my mind connected to the Coventry Carol, which laments and mourns the death of the innocents by a king motivated (as the gunman today presumably was) by madness and evil. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jIYyPOoEc8