The heart-breaking news from Tumbler Ridge, BC, of the shooting of schoolchildren and others by an 18-year-old woman, is a trauma which this small town will take decades to get through. It also sends a global tremor of grief and perplexity through the world media as people hear of it on their daily news; as Mark Carney, the Prime Minister, articulating the visceral shock and grief of a whole nation tried to control his own tears.
Grief is part of the human lot. But it is especially devastating when the cause is so hard to understand. Why? How? A young person with mental health problems and suffering a crisis of personal identity who goes berserk is tragically not unknown in our disturbed and unbalanced global culture. This unpatrolled world of the internet today penetrates directly to wherever there is a wifi connection.
Long before the internet, an English poet, John Donne wrote a poem he called ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls. He wrote,
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Every woman, every man is involved, connected to each other more profoundly and inescapably than any media connection. We feel a grief like this together. It brings us together. In a strange, unwelcome yet sacred way it exposes our unity as a human family. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims, yet we know that at least in this grief we are all one family.
That is the feeling we need to treasure. It is a mysterious gift, the only one, in such a devastating moment. For now, it presses pause on all other headlines and global crises. Yet the intensity of the grief and the question ‘why has this happened’ can be so painful that we soon blame and condemn as we look for a single cause or person. Of course, the 18-year-old who pressed the trigger carries responsibility. Yet just as we are involved in each other’s losses, so we are connected to each other in the personal suffering and social conditions that led her, and others, to do this terrible thing.
For now, though, we can simply share the grief, pray for the victims and their families. This sadness and empathy reveal our essential human connection with every human being, good, bad, victim and perpetrator. Before we forget, we need to remember what this human unity means.
Then perhaps we will be led to wisdom through the grief and anger. Wisdom also unites us as a human family, with deep healing. And between wisdom and grief, we hope to see into the social conditions that link Tumbler Ridge today to similar recent nightmares on every continent and consider what changes we can make to our world. In the inescapable trauma of death that separates, there is also a reminder of our mysterious unity as a human family.
