COMMENTARY: No Time for Simple Answers

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) When Americans gaze on the bodies of 32 students murdered on their idyllic Virginia Tech campus, our attention is momentarily diverted from reality TV to reality. We would rather not be confronted with the latter because our shared national mythology is that of Walt Disney, who repeatedly brought us […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When Americans gaze on the bodies of 32 students murdered on their idyllic Virginia Tech campus, our attention is momentarily diverted from reality TV to reality.

We would rather not be confronted with the latter because our shared national mythology is that of Walt Disney, who repeatedly brought us stories of underdogs overcoming obstacles and good triumphing over evil. We still comfort ourselves with the words of 19th century political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote, “America is great because America is good,” despite daily evidence to the contrary.


As our lives fail to fulfill our mythology, we sedate ourselves with escapist entertainment. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as the new season of “Survivor” opened, and we chose to watch upper-middle class Americans giving up their lattes for 30 days and pretending to survive on an island instead of staying with CNN, on which people cut holes in their roofs to scramble out and avoid drowning in the rising waters.

Sometimes events are so massively scaled we are forced to pause and linger: the assassination of JFK, the explosion of the Challenger, airliners hitting the World Trade Center. Sometimes our personal journey takes us on a treacherous path we would not have chosen: the birth of a brother with brain damage, an unwanted divorce, cancer or the loss of a child. These personal and communal brushes with a darker reality provide brief teachable moments, a chance to calibrate our mythology to truth. As C.S. Lewis once said, “In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.”

What are some of these facts as they are?

1. Evil is real and good people are not immune its effects. After experiencing the devastation of World War I, theologian Paul Tillich came to believe that “life itself is not dependable ground.” Any mythology that ignores or minimizes evil cannot survive the scrutiny imposed by real human events.

2. Evil dwells in every human. In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech onslaught our attention will be focused on the shooter’s mental instability and moral insufficiencies. We’ll hear anguished news commentators asking why and pundits eager to place blame.

The Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn would ask that we quietly ponder our universal human condition. He wrote, “If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

3. Even in the rubble of our fallen nature and culture, there is beauty shining through. Artist Bruce Herman, organizer of an exhibit called “Broken Beauty,” feels we do our children a disservice if we tell them “when you wish upon a star anything your heart desires will come to you and your dreams will come true.” He advises us to tell our kids life is hard, evil is everywhere, but good, beauty and God are revealed even in the world’s brokenness.

This was true Monday when Liviu Librescu, 76, a Holocaust survivor and engineering lecturer at Virginia Tech for 20 years, died in the massacre, but only after saving the lives of several students. He heroically blocked the doorway of his classroom from the approaching gunman before he was fatally shot, ironically on the same day Israel marks Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day.


Events like Monday’s remind us that God is mystery and complexity. Niall Williams’s “As It Is in Heaven” is an Irish novel about a man who loses his wife and child in an automobile accident. Williams writes, “There are only three great puzzles in the world. The puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all. When a car drives off the road and crashes into your life, you feel the puzzle of God.”

For those of us for whom God is of central importance, this is not a time for quick, simple explanations. This is a time to reflect on the facts as they are and to continue to feel puzzle of God in the context of the evil we have witnessed.

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of “The Kindlings Muse” (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com.)

DSB/LF END STAUB

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