Recently in the news, there was some surveillance footage released from inside Robb Elementary, the school where the tragic mass shooting of 21 people, most of whom were young children, occurred just a short time ago. And in a portion of the footage showing a police officer in a hallway, I noticed, in the top left-hand corner of the screen, was an editor’s note.
It read: “The sound of children screaming has been removed.”
Now, it’s easy to imagine why an editor would choose to edit the footage in this way—to make it less graphic. To make it palatable enough to show on the evening news so that average Americans like you and I can watch it on CNN over dinner, shake our heads, and then go back to our lives like those children’s deaths were only real until we shut the TV off and go to sleep. We wake up the next morning as if nothing ever happened, as if the rampant gun violence in this country is just a bad dream we can go to sleep and wake up from. Now, I don’t claim to know what goes through a 4th grader’s mind when a man with a gun comes into their classroom, but if ever there were a nightmare I’d hope to wake up from, it would be that one. But none of those children will ever, ever, wake up. Because what’s happening in this country is not a bad dream. It’s a terrifying battleground, a war of “2nd amendment rights” that we’ve enlisted our children in to fight and die for.
I’d like to speak to any Christians who read this. Every Sunday, when you go to church, you see a cross hanging up in the sanctuary. For Catholics, we see a crucifix. Every time we step foot in our churches, we gaze our eyes upon the image of the crucified Christ, with his five sacred, precious, holy wounds. How many times in the span of our entire lives will we look at Christ’s wounds? Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe even tens of thousands of times. When the time comes for all of us, and we finally meet Christ in heaven, he will embrace us and wrap us in his loving arms, and perhaps, with a gentle voice, he will say to each of us, “My precious child, why did you hide your face from my pain?” And we will answer back, “Lord, when have I ever hidden my face from your pain? Every Sunday from the time I was small up until my death I looked at you, and I fixed my eyes on your wounds. Lord, I have never hidden from you.” And he will reply, “Beloved, you hid your face from my pain when I was in Robb Elementary school, hiding under a desk, scared and alone. You hid your face from my pain when I was mourning and weeping the death of my children. You hid your face from my pain when it was easier to pretend I was never suffering at all.”
Jesus weeps for those children. Jesus weeps for those families. Jesus weeps for us and our country, because we care more about guns and individual freedoms than we do about each other.
Christ will never hide his face from our pain. It’s high time that we stop hiding ours.
Our Lady of Light 