Like most that live around Virginia Tech, the anniversary of the shootings can seem to hang over my head.  But now there is something else.
Westboro Baptist Church is coming into town. Â The delightful gang that started the godhatesfags website and has recently been picketting funerals of everyone from soldiers who have been killed in action, to those of children that have been killed by cars. Â At all of them the theme is the same, “God hates you and what you are doing. Â You (or someone else) caused this.”
Seems their schedule is flexible enough to fit us in. Â Wonderful. Â Here is their itenerary while they are in the area.
So now, those of us in leadership of just about any group are asking ourselves the question, what do we do to respond to what they do? Â I have heard great ideas that range from simply being somewhere else and not giving them any audience, to some that are suggesting we aggressively protest them.
The question I have is, what is a thoughtful Christ-like response to thoughtless rantings? Â At [nlcf], we are kicking around a number of ideas right now. Â In the next few days we will list out what we are suggesting. Â I am sure we will also want to be as involved as possible in the local and university’s response to all this is going to be.
So, what do you think we should do? Â What would you suggest? Â Why would you suggest it?
~~ I have just removed the hotlink to the WBC site at the suggestion of a web-savvy-internet-guru friend named Liz! Â She felt it was best to not make it easier/enticing for people to go to the site and essentially help their numbers stay high.
I wanted to let you all know about a speaker that is coming to Tech tonight at 7pm as a part of the . His name is Bart Ehrman and he is the James A Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the chair of Religious Studies as well as a widely published author. A brief overview of his personal history is that he was an evangelical Christian, attending Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College. During his post-graduate theological studies at Princeton, he began to first question and then ultimately disavow his faith in Christ, largely as a result of his issues with the problem of suffering in the world.
If you decide to come to the lecture you will hear a guy that is actually quite an engaging speaker and very funny at times. I think you will enjoy your experience. Personally, I like thinkers like Dr. Ehrman even though I significantly disagree with them. He, and other textual critics that would agree with his conclusions, require that we deeply engage issues of our faith that some would prefer to not. The days of I believe this because I was told to believe this are gratefully gone.
I was asked to be interviewed for the on the shootings. They are working to develop a very broad oral history archive that will be both stored at Tech and used for a variety of other purposes. I always try to be as helpful to Tech as I can be, so I willingly agreed.
Just being asked about those horrible days was much more upsetting than I thought it would be. I am not the most emotional guy around — But I am still at the point that I really don’t know what will happen when people ask me to recount the shootings.
Don’t get me wrong here, I am fine with that. I learned that there is no point in berating myself for not having some particular response, just be honest with where I am and move through it. But it brought me right back into those days.
Rita Mae Brown said this…
I still miss those I loved who are no longer with me but I find I am grateful for having loved them. The gratitude has finally conquered the loss.
For me it is a bit different, but I love her words. For me the sadness isn’t bound up in the personal loss. Even though three of the victims had attended our church, I didn’t know them personally. My sadness is often bound up in the pain their deaths’ brought so many others. My sadness is bound up in how a world that can often look so beautiful can at the same time be so broken, so ugly.
But one day, just as gratitude finally conquers loss, one day, the beauty of God will ultimately remove the ugliness.
And then no one else will have to be interviewed and recount another horrible thing.
And I think that will be great.
