Jonesboro, Arkansas.

Something does not love us

A horror like the shootings in Jonesboro, Arkansas, makes us sharply aware of how little we understand ourselves or what it means to be human. Our ideas of good and evil are challenged when good and evil move out of the places we expect to find them, and we look for explanations: the ready availability of guns, television violence, abusive homes (though at this writing it isn't clear that either of the boys in custody came from such homes).

The meaninglessness of it, the stupidity, the thought that this could happen to any of our children at any minute - all of it terrifies - and our search for an explanation is a kind of nervous gabbing. Of course the availability of guns has something to do with it, but thousands of boys in the Midwest and the South hunt and never use guns violently; millions of kids watch television and are consequently desensitized, but not that much; and I know survivors of abusive homes who aren't about to start killing. We look for the specific thing that might make one or more of these factors unite to light a fuse, and we talk about prevention. Fat chance.

There is something that does not love humanity, that seeks to destroy us, and it will use whatever it can, flow through whatever little channel we allow. This idea - that there is such a thing as something that endangers us spiritually to the point of seeking our destruction, that the demonic is more than a metaphor for what we don't like - is extremely unpopular these days. It is almost always caricatured: little red guys with tails and horns and pitchforks, do we believe in that? And aren't we looking at a kind of counter-God, and isn't that un-Christian, dualistic? Didn't the idea of demons enter our tradition from the Zoroastrians and other Eastern, non-Jewish sources anyway? And aren't these kids sick, not demonic?

Among the other ideas that enter our tradition from non-Jewish sources is the Last Judgment. Should we (despite Jesus' reliance on the idea) scrap it? Jesus was also unpopular on the idea of the demonic: "Deliver us from evil" is a reference not to some abstract evil but, most scholars seem to agree, "the evil one." And the evil one will use anything he (or she - we must be inclusive) can, including confused and unhappy little boys, or - at a more banal level than the Jonesboro murders - unhappy wives, husbands, sons, and daughters. I know a man who spent years recovering from a single sentence. He wanted to be reassured that his dead father loved him; his mother, who hated his dead father, told him instead - deliberately withholding the word love - that his father had been proud of him. That is not what he needed to hear, and his mother's need for revenge, probably hidden to her, nearly destroyed her son. It may not seem so big a deal to you, but it was for him.

The range of evil and its way of working with us goes from this tragic domestic level to Hitler. The real mystery is not Hitler's sickness (if he was sick at all) but the fact that so many were willing, and some even happy, to follow him. We don't like to think of this as a continuum, because it is important to our self-esteem - always an illusion - to think that we are radically different, or different in some way, from those who are capable of serious evil. Our freedom makes us capable of choosing anything, and our fallenness makes us likely to make mistakes based on what will shore up our own egos, and a series of bad choices can lead us into a corner in which we might find ourselves making the choice to wound or kill someone we see as an enemy. I don't think this comes into our lives accidentally, like a draft of cold air through a door that blows open. Something is out to destroy us, and until quite recently most of Christian and Jewish tradition understood this. Evil has been defeated, but doesn't know it. That is also part of the tradition.

And something more is part of our tradition, and it has to do with something deeper than choice, something instinctive and holy: the teacher, Shannon Wright, who, hearing the shots, threw herself between the shots and the children and died to save them; and the approximately five hundred people who, without any public call, showed up to donate blood...this is a sign of something deeper and finally more true about humanity. We are made in God's image, and it shows itself in places like this.

There is no proof that God is real, or that anything in life makes any ultimate sense. All we can do is to pray that we have the discernment to live by "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen" (Hebrews 11: 1). The deeper truths of what happened in Jonesboro are not to be found in the sad, stupid acts of adolescents who acted in an evil way, but in the noble - all the more noble and moving for not even having been thought about - reaction of Shannon Wright, and the kindness of people who wanted to donate blood. There is nothing clear here, only clues which can be seen as pointing in different directions. We have to pray for the boys who allowed this to happen, for their families, for the families who will never again know the presence on earth of the people they loved.

To believe that meaning can be found anywhere here is an act of faith, like the faith of the father who, after Jesus told him that all things are possible for the one who believes, cried "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" From our point of view, the father's wavering faith isn't much to work with. The wonder is that God can use even this doubting faith (the only kind most of us will ever know) to work miracles and heal; the miracle is that the most dramatic evil is finally defeated by humble and un-self-conscious acts of love.