The Speakable and the Nameless

Twenty children are speakable this morning.  They are not in pain.  We don't fear of their eternal destinies.  We mourn their moments of terror yesterday.  Their families and the good who look on are the ones who now suffer.  The families of the dead are speakable.  The lives of these children are speakable, and we celebrate their lives.

Six, maybe seven adults are speakable. I don't know of their virtue. The martyred almost always become saints.  They are speakable for the injustice done them. They are not in any pain. We sympathize with their moments of terror and honor their lives. We celebrate their lives.

There is one nameless, once significant but now an insignificant loony, forever forgotten.

How do we move forward? Hire a policeman for every school? Use the opportunity to move forward with common sense gun control? Consider the culture of violence in movies and games we have allowed to overtake us?  Increase funding to deal with the mentally ill of society?  Probably.

What of God?  Was this part of his well-laid out plan, as some Christian pop-theology would say? I would rather say God allows such things to happen than orchestrates such things.

Faith in the mystery of God's permissive will at least gives hope. Those who abandon faith at this point are left with no hope of joy for the dead or sense of justice for the nameless.

We are reminded again of how little we are against the scope of all space and time, which of course also makes our death a relatively minor detail.  But today we celebrate the significance of twenty-six or seven lives.  We will celebrate them well.