If Today You Hear His Voice, Harden Not Your Hearts

One of the great joys that accompanied my travels to Ireland with the Saint Ignatius/Walsh Jesuit Irish Studies Program was my ability to visit with my family.

I can remember on my first trip, my daughter, Kathleen, and I made the trip from our “base of operations” at Queen’s University Belfast to a little town called Templepatrick to meet my grandmother’s people. Over tea and biscuits, Kathleen and I explained why we had come to Ireland: to learn about the Peace Process, which had emerged as a way of resolving the 30+-year conflict, euphemistically called “the Troubles.”

What struck us most, Kathleen and I, about our conversation was not just that we had very different political positions than our cousins on the constitutional questions surrounding Northern Ireland, but how they downplayed the violence and division the Troubles had caused. “The press made too much of that,” they said. “It wasn’t really that bad.”

But as we got into our second and third cups of tea, they revealed a little more. One of them had been held at gunpoint in Belfast City Centre by a balaklava-wearing terrorist. Another had a tire from a car-bomb explosion land just feet away from her. 

“And then there was our brother.”

Their brother, my cousin, Joseph McBride, was blown up by an IRA bomb as he entered a pub up the street from his home.

There was a certain shocking cavalierness in their approach to the violence that affected their part of the world. They seemed to think that car bombing, masked gunmen, and murder were the normal stuff of life. 

I thought about them as I reacted to the news of the shooting of schoolchildren at Annunciation School in Minneapolis. When I initially heard the story, my first act was to ask how many children had been killed. When I learned that two had died, I thought to myself—God forgive me—“Thank the Lord it was only two.”

ONLY two?!?!

Eight-year-old Fletcher Merkel and ten-year-old Harper Moyski were babies, little kids who went to school—to Mass—undoubtedly looking forward to a year filled with birthday parties, field trips, and play dates. Fletcher and Harper were the light of their parents’ lives. They were not statistics. They mattered. And they have gone much too soon.

But all I could think about in that moment was that “only two” died.

For all my previous condescension toward my Irish cousins, it became clear to me how quickly I, too, had made the obscene “normal.” Shooting children in schools is not normal. Yet we’ve made it so.

Scripture speaks often of the phenomenon of the “hardening of hearts.” A “hard” heart is one that, among other things, fails or refuses to accept God’s love or do His will and is unwilling or unable to change. A hard heart is often caused, we’re told, by things like repeated sinful behavior, selfishness, and pride. But as Pope Francis noted in a 2015 meditation, the heart also “becomes hardened through painful experiences, through harsh experiences” by those who “have lived a very painful experience and don’t want to begin another adventure.” 

In the wake of the painful experiences of gun violence in our schools, I fear that our hearts have become hardened. Since the Columbine shootings in 1999 there have been over 2,000 shooting events on school campuses in the United States, resulting in the deaths of some 500 people (not to mention all of the wounded). So common have these events become that social scientists categorize between school shootings and “mass” shootings. Of those 2,000 shootings, I suspect that most of us could name only a few: Columbine (because it was the “first”), Sandy Hook (because most of the victims were primary school children), and maybe Chardon (because it was so close). However, many of these stories hit the airwaves as “breaking news” only to quickly fade away from the spotlight and our collective consciousness. I suspect that by the time this is published, the story of the Annunciation School shooting will have already been relegated to the back page, if it makes the papers at all.

Because our hearts have been hardened, we may well feel sadness when news of school violence comes our way and maybe even voice our outrage, but, honestly, we do little to stop it. Some politicians advocate for arming teachers (suggesting to me that they know next to nothing about pistols—and even less about teachers). Schools train faculty and staff on how to handle “active shooter” situations. English teacher and friend, Cindy Hruby, shared on Facebook how we have been trained to pack bullet and shrapnel wounds, apply combat tourniquets, and utilize clotting powder. What she didn’t share was how we were also trained to expect blood everywhere if/when we would need to evacuate our kids were to would come across a wounded student or colleague, we were to pass them by and leave them for the medics who would hopefully arrive soon. The wounded, after all, would slow us down, endangering the larger group. 

Sound as that advice may be, it’s the utilitarian calculus of storming Omaha Beach, not running a school.  

And imagine what it was like to face the boys in first period after hearing that.

We live in a representative democracy. We elect leaders to meet and work to help solve our society’s ills—like the problems of school (and other) shootings. When it comes to gun violence (and issues like abortion, immigration, Medicare, etc.), there are often competing rights and values at stake. I have neither the space nor the expertise to comment on how those rights should be upheld or modified. That is supposed to be the role of our leaders in government who—having virtually unlimited resources and time—are commissioned, as the American Bishops pleaded in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas shootings three years ago: 

[To engage in] dialogue followed by concrete action to bring about a broader social renewal that addresses all aspects of the [gun violence] crisis, including mental health, the state of families, the valuation of life, the influence of entertainment and gaming industries, bullying, and the availability of firearms…[and passing] reasonable gun control measures.

This is what politics is supposed to be: principled women and men struggling with important issues, working to achieve the common good, and recognizing that the common good may require sacrifices. St. Thomas reminds us that key to attaining the common good is the formulation of reasonable, enforceable laws: laws that first and foremost preserve human life, not one that merely appeases one’s political base.

Many of us feel hopeless in the wake of this latest tragedy. We ask what we can do.

As always, we can pray for God to change the hearts of those who would do harm to others. Tennyson’s dictum, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of,” still holds true. But as we pray, we can—and should—also hold our officials accountable for working to remedy our problem with gun violence. Saint Ignatius Director of Mission, Augie Pacetti ’96, for example, has crafted a petition using the language of our bishops and urging them “to support policy and legislative measures that reduce gun violence and uphold the safety and well-being of all persons in our communities.” Many of us have signed it. I would argue that all of us should pay careful attention to how our representatives do this time, and perhaps show them the door if they refuse to humbly and conscientiously work to resolve the issue of gun violence.

Novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad, writing in a different context, reflects that we are often slow to work at resolving life-and-death policy issues for the simple reason that they usually do not affect us directly. We may be sad about the wanton destruction of life, but the victims “aren’t our people,” and so we kick those issues down the road. 

But if we truly embrace the Fatherhood of God, then everyone is not just “our people”—they’re our family. And we’re responsible for them.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews challenged us that “if today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts” (Heb. 4:7). 

The Suffering Servant spoke to us once again. This time through the children of Annunciation School.

It’s time to soften our hearts and harden our stand against the violence that is killing our children.

 

A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H