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Reflections on Virginia Tech
By Shiao Chong, Christian Reformed Campus Minister
& Director of Leadership, Culture &
Christianity
Serving at York University, Toronto
www.logoscrc.ca |
chaplain@logoscrc.ca
The following is a short email reflection
piece to the members and friends of Leadership, Culture and Christianity, a
student club at York University. It was originally written a few days after the
shooting massacre at Virginia Tech University on April 16, 2007.
Dear Members and Friends of LCC (Leadership, Culture & Christianity),
By now, most of you (if not all) will know of the
news of the Virginia Tech shooting that occurred on Monday, April 16. I do not
know how this shocking and tragic news is affecting any of you, or whether any
of you have friends or relatives connected to Virginia Tech. No doubt, for some
of you, this shooting reminds us of the Dawson College shooting in Montreal last
year, and of course the 1989 killings of 14 women in l'École Polytechnique, also
in Montreal. And what about Columbine? I pray the God of comfort to embrace each
of us through this time.
Through my campus chaplain’s network, I have heard that many Asian American
students are affected by this, especially Korean Americans, because of the
shooter’s ethnicity. They feel distressed, disturbed and anxious about possible
backlash. I pray that people will not succumb to such rash thinking and action
of backlash.
Christian workers at Blackburn, Virginia had to counsel the traumatized and
faced the question of “Where is God?” They answered, “God is here mourning with
us.”
I believe that is true. But does that comfort you? I don’t know. It does comfort
me to some extent. To know that God suffers with us. To know that God
understands what pain is; to know that God faced the worst of evil in Jesus
Christ when he was tortured and died on a cross as an innocent man. As
Christians, we have a God who is intimately acquainted with the grief and
anguish that comes from the injustice and the senselessness of innocent victims.
Jesus was himself an innocent victim. And in his suffering, Jesus himself asked
the why question: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)
These words themselves are quoted from Psalm 22:1-5 – “My God, my God, why have
you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my
groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find
no rest. Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel. In you our
ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried, and
were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.”
The late Catholic theologian Henri Nouwen wrote, “This prayer not only is the
expression of the experience of the people of Israel, but also the culmination
of the Christian experience. When Jesus spoke these words on the cross, total
aloneness [from God] and full acceptance [by God] touched each other. In that
moment of complete emptiness all was fulfilled. In that hour of darkness new
light was seen. While death was witnessed, life was affirmed. Where God’s
absence was most loudly expressed, God’s presence was most profoundly revealed.
When God, through the humanity of Jesus, freely chose to share our own most
painful experience of divine absence, God became most present to us. It is into
this mystery that we enter when we pray.” (Reaching Out)
God not only experienced our physical and emotional pains, God also experienced
our spiritual pain of absence or alienation from God. And through that, God
identifies most closely with all of us; God identifies with us, physically,
emotionally and spiritually, in all our sorrows and grief. And, yet, the
Christian hope is that in that moment of deepest identification with our
alone-ness, when Jesus was on the cross, God gives us hope when he triumphed
over death, over that alone-ness, over all those sorrows and sufferings in the
resurrection of Christ, in the empty tomb. Death, suffering, grief, alienation
is not the final word for humanity at any time. It is not the final word at this
time for us either. May the God who suffered and died for us be near us now.
Related Article: Prayer for Virginia Tech
Memorial Service
Copyright © Shiao C. Chong 2007
This article can be copied and distributed freely provided its content has not
been changed. This resource cannot be sold or distributed for financial gain. It
must be free. And it must be unedited. Otherwise, the author reserves all rights
to the resource.
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