A week of instability.

Thinking, of course, about the horrors at Virginia Tech. And also, on a more local scale, a young woman, a grad student at Columbia University was abducted, raped and tortured for 19 hours before the man set her bed on fire and left her to die. She escaped by using the fire to burn off her restraints and run. The man was at large this week, and he had been spotted at the nearest grocery store to Union and at the deli across the street where we all get our coffee 19 times a day. It's been particularly scary to just walk around my neighborhood: everyone's acting "normal", but it's not comforting. RAINN reports that in America, a woman is assaulted every two-and-a-half minutes. And the vast majority of sexual assaults are not by random crazy strangers: they are by "friends", dates, family members or acquaintances. I wish, when something this tragic happens, one of the articles would remind us of that. This is happening all the time. It will have happened a couple times before you finish reading this post.

Today in chapel we held a special service commemorating those who died at Virginia. I was surprised to hear that no one prayed for the gunman, until finally, mercifully, Rev. Carl Gerdau, from the pew, intoned, "And for our brother Cho" at the very end of the prayers of the people. I think about how grateful I am that in my New Testament class, when we prayed on Thursday, we prayed for all those who died, for the families and friends, for the community, of course. But we also prayed for Koreans and Korean-Americans, and for all those who are alienated, for all those who we render "alien", and for Cho. On campus at Union, there are several Korean and Korean-American students, who have been badly shaken by this, and worried about their own safety. I've noticed that the wikipedia page on South Korea has been disabled for revision until May 4 - it's likely that people were trying to alter it in ugly ways in response to the Virginia Tech tragedy.

This makes me wonder about blame: we are so ready to start looking for whose fault it was. Was it the professors who knew he was troubled? The school kids who ignored him? His family? Anyone but us, right? We certainly don't know anything about isolating and alienating people.

This also makes me think about how the New York Times reported that the school wasn't immediately put on alert after the first shooting because it was considered "just a domestic quarrel". Apparently men shooting women is so common it's not worth shutting down the campus. I mentioned this to a group of five friends at seminary, mentioning that just a few weeks ago, a young woman was killed at the University of Washington by her stalker ex-boyfriend. She had done everything: moved, got a restraining order, warned some of her co-workers. Three of the other five people said, "Yeah, that happened at my campus too." What??!! We have decided as a culture that this kind of violence is tolerable, that intimate partner violence is just something that happens. We don't talk about domestic violence or rape in church, even though it is certain that someone or many people in the congregation has/have experienced it. We are so scared, so scared that is violence is actually us, that we participate in hushing up pain, in looking the other way, in not looking at the very real ways women are punished for being women every day.

I realize now that this is not an Easter-y message. But it is what is happening. And God asks us to look at what is really there, and not what we want to be there. We are asked to look straight at the crucifixion, and Jesus looked straight at the woman with the hemorrhage. No hiding. No ducking, no convincing ourselves that it's not happening in our congregation, in our school, in our hospital. I was so grateful to the New York Times Sunday magazine article of a few weeks ago that took seriously the pain of women in the military, experiencing great trauma while sacrificing much for their beliefs (it's still available online here). It's real. And we called to heal, absolutely. Our Messiah was and is a healer, and if we truly the body of Christ, the hands and feet of Jesus, we must heal too. But first we must we willing to look at where it hurts. We must be willing to name certain violences, instead of just pretending there are multiple isolated incidents of this kind. We must retrain our eyes to see what we try not to see: the lonely, the afraid, the marginalized, the disenfranchised, the violated, the scared, the alone, the alienated among us.




As a couple of final notes, Andrew recommends the college's website: they've done a truly admirable job dealing with the tragedy online. Go here to see. I also highly, highly, highly (can't emphasize this enough) recommend the Faith Trust Institute, a collection of advocacy and informational materials for congregations and other faithful people thinking and talking about intimate violence. The woman who founded it, the Rev. Dr. Marie Fortune, also has a lovely blog.

-Shelly