A recap of events during my college years:
On Oct. 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts IV killed five girls at an Amish school in Pennsylvania before taking his own life.
On Apr. 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech before taking his own life.
On Dec. 5, 2007, Robert A. Hawkins killed eight people only 50 miles north of here in Omaha before taking his own life.
Only four days later, on Dec. 9, 2007, Matthew Murray killed four people in a shooting spree at a missionary training school and then at New Life Church in Colorado Springs before being gunned down by a church security guard.
On Dec. 24, 2008, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo stormed a Christmas Eve party in a Los Angeles suburb dressed as Santa Claus, armed with guns and homemade napalm. He then killed nine adults, wounded two children, including an eight-year-old girl he had shot at point blank range in the face who somehow survived, and then took his own life.
On Mar. 10, 2009, Michael McLendon killed ten people – including his mother and four other relatives – in rural Alabama before taking his own life.
On Mar. 29, 2009, Devan Kalathat shot and killed his two children and three other people in upscale Santa Clara, Calif., before taking his own life.
Last Friday, Jiverly Voong killed 13 people at a Binghamton, N.Y., civic center before taking his own life.
Then on Saturday, Richard Poplawski of Pittsburgh killed three police officers before being taken into custody.
That’s not all the mass shootings that have happened in recent years.
When you include those, 132 people are dead in mass shootings since I took my seat in Radha Balasubramanian’s Russian Literature class on a crisp Monday morning in the fall of 2006.
We all remember when such events were horrifying headline grabbers. Their senselessness broke us, their rareness shocked us and their memory haunted us.
Such was the case when on Apr. 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris shot up Columbine High School, killing 12 students and one teacher before taking their own lives.
Yet in 2009, we’re no longer so horrified at such events. They’ve become commonplace in a culture on its last legs.
The editorial that ran in Saturday’s edition of Binghamton’s Press & Sun-Bulletin sounded a tone of resignation, a helpless acceptance that such events are unavoidable: “It is our turn to grieve and to rally in support of those whose lives have been shattered. And it’s our turn to hug those in our own families and wonder how a quiet, rainy Friday in a peaceful place became the setting for such a nightmare.”
When we see these events, it leaves a void in our gut, and we don’t know how to make sense of what we’re witnessing.
Everything we traditionally hold on to feels slick, and if we haven’t lost hold of it completely, we can feel our grip slipping.
For me, that something is the Christian faith. In fact, I’d go a step further and insist the Christian faith doesn’t only offer subjective hope to me and every other Christian, but objective hope to all people.
That’s what Christians will be celebrating this week, which is Holy Week on the church calendar.
On Friday, Christians around the world will gather and mourn the events of the day we paradoxically call Good Friday. We’ll try to stand in the shadow of the cross, a gruesome and brutal symbol of all the power of the world’s evil.
We believe that the crucifixion marks the outpouring of all the world’s evil - the evil that motivated Seung-Hui Cho, Robert Hawkins, Jiverly Voong, and Richard Poplawski - onto God himself. It marks evil’s attempt to defeat God.
On Sunday, we’ll gather and try to live in the light of the empty tomb. We believe the resurrection marks the ultimate conquest over evil, God’s triumphant vanquishing of our great enemy: death. It’s this event that causes Paul - ordinarily a rather cold personality - to break into poetry in one of his epistles asking, “Oh death, where is your sting?”
Yet while the resurrection guarantees the triumph of good over evil so that our hope is certain, it is a check in the process of being cashed. Tony Campolo puts it this way, “We’re a people living on the Saturday after Good Friday, waiting for Sunday.”
For now, evil exists. It crushes us like a boat against the rocks of the shore.
So this Sunday, we’ll struggle to greet each other with the words, “He is risen,” – words that encapsulate all the hope of billions of people throughout history that we won’t always live in a world where people shoot people to deal with loss. The reason we try to believe is not that our hope is uncertain. It isn’t.
If Christianity is true, then evil was emptied of its ultimate power 2,000 years ago in a remote corner of the Roman Empire. Our hope is certain. But believing that in the midst of loss sometimes seems impossible.
We do not embrace hope as a people detached from the world’s suffering, but as a people intimately acquainted with it.
This Sunday, we’ll say “He is risen” and try to believe it.
The next day, we’ll try to do it again.
And the next.
And the next time someone uses a gun to deal with loss.
Jake meador is a junior history and english major. Reach him at jakemeador@dailynebraskan.com.
MEADOR: Facing evil, Christians look to resurrection for victory
Published: Sunday, April 5, 2009
Updated: Sunday, April 5, 2009
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