I saw the school shooting footage yesterday on Fox news, a station that plays at all times in my workplace break room. Fox news reported that the school shooting was averted by an armed officer.
It appears at this point that in actuality, the boy, who carried an AK-47, a gun bag, and various magazines and other accoutrements, was talked down over the course of a tense hour by an unarmed school clerk, who happened to be sitting at the front of the school, in a seat that wasn’t hers, covering for a receptionist’s break.
I listened to her whole interview today. She described him as a boy who was hurting. She described talking to him about her life struggles – a severely disabled child, a divorce from her husband of 33 years – and how she could understand his pain but that things can get better. She spoke to him and about him with empathy and compassion. She said she had learned to be this way at church, having been taught “anchoring” – to “anchor” her daily experiences in God’s love. At one point the clerk (a black woman) told the gunman (a white boy) that her mother’s maiden name was the same as his, and they could be related. He said, in reply, “Oh!” He asked for a drink of water, and she told him he would be ok, and she got him a drink of water.
And he put his guns down, laid on the floor, and allowed the police to put him in custody, without having hurt a single person.
I’m not naive – I know the Sandy Hook front office workers didn’t get the chance to talk down the boy that stormed their building, because he shot them to death within seconds. He was urged by a more fervent and ferocious purpose to take the step into the abyss, past the point of no return, to make a brutal expression of his pain splashed on grisly news reports sent out to the entire world, to create wild and feral pain for others in his wake. (If there were others, in the days before the shooting, who could have reached him, we will never know.) The 20 year old in Atlanta, by contrast, seems similarly to have been looking for a way to express his personal pain in a spectacular, egotistical, attention-getting way, and yet looking for a way out of the horrible plan he’d set in motion. Felicity, luck, providence – think of any word you like to describe it, but the truth of the matter is that he found a way out by meeting a woman of God, who sees a child of God even in the body of a boy dressed all in black, carrying assault rifles and magazines and a black backpack full of deadly weapons. She, a mother, was faced with the ultimate threat, the spectre who haunts the dreams of every parent in America with children in school. And she saw God, and spoke to him as if he was a child of God, and saved her own life and potentially dozens of others.
This is the version of Christianity, and Christian expression in the secular world, that I can fully get behind. This is how people who want to follow Christ would actually follow Christ, if religion went by my measure – by being awash with love, by greeting all people with love, by staring at your death and the death of children in your care, and projecting only love back. Greeting people set on mayhem and violence won’t always work this way. Meeting violent fury with love and empathy will not always end happily.
But my heart sings to know that yesterday, it did.
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Reporter: “You showed a certain compassion to this young man with a gun.”
A. “Yes. I seen myself and my kids [in him].”
R. “Are you going to work tomorrow?”
A. “Yeah. I probably will be there. Nothing like the babies . . . Yes I’ll be back, sitting in that same seat, blessing the next person.”
Watching it now. She is a remarkable person, and as you point out, a beautiful example to all of us.
Kate @ BJJ, Law, and Living
That is a beautiful story, and as you said, a beautiful example of Christianity as it is meant to be.
Sunday in his sermon, our priest used her as an example of the gospel lived out. Every time she was asked about why or how she did it, all she says is “to God be the glory”.