Shooting in Colorado

Human Doctrines

“This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”

                                         Isaiah 29:13

I watched the news last night. Coverage of the shooting in Colorado took up most of the time. There was footage of police trying to get safely into the shooter's apartment which had been booby trapped with explosives and fire bombs designed to kill anyone who entered. There were pitiful interviews with survivors of the rampage in the movie theater. At the very end, there was slight reference to gun control, but that was quickly shut down by a politician reciting the tired line about constitutional rights, about not infringing on honest people who love guns. This damaged, insane person spent a couple of months buying weapons and ammunition and bomb-making materials, ordering on line and going into area stores, and no one was even slightly suspicious about the shear volume of the weaponry, ammunition and explosives he bought.

In the next frame of the nightly news, all the athletes were arriving for the Olympics in London. Everybody was happy and the air of excitement around the beautifully festooned city was captivating. Suddenly I found myself sobbing. The swing from the young people setting up sad memorials for their fallen friends and children in Aurora, Colorado, to the happy, hopeful faces of the worlds' children arriving for the 'games' in London was just too much to bear. We human beings are both the scourge and the hope of the world. We are heaven and hell rolled into one species.

I feel for the parents, children and loved ones of the victims. They are gathering today in Colorado, including the parents of the shooter, who is but a child himself. Their lives are forever changed. They will stand vigil tonight and pray for the fifty-eight who are still in hospitals with various degrees of wounding. The rights of people to live without fear of being shot dead in a movie theater will lose out once again to the NRA's right to sell automatic weapons. The absurd violence in movies and television will continue and life will return to 'normal'. Until the next time. And the next.

Let us pray for ourselves. Let us pray that somewhere along the way, our humanity will win out.

                                     In the spirit,

                                     Jane