Spirit Daily
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Killings Join With Storms As Signs Of The Times And Signs Of A Coming Maelstrom
First story
It was like a barometer of the times, of the evil. In the 1960s, it was Charles Whitman. He shot 13 on a campus. In the 1990s, it was Columbine. The dead there, again 13.
Now in the first decade of a new and turbulent century -- a new millennium -- the toll is a ghastly 33, with 15 injured, the worst such shooting in American history.
It's like they follow a pattern related to other things. Whitman shot from a tower at the University of Texas in 1966. Richard Speck (who sported a tattoo that said "Born of Raise Hell") killed eight student nurses that same strange year in Chicago. Two students immersed in dark Gothic music killed 12 students in Colorado in 1999. And now there are the more than thirty -- two and a half times Columbine -- on that campus at this moment in history that swirls at greater speed in the formation of a coming maelstrom.
Stuff is coming. There is turmoil just over the horizon. There will be a major upheaval. There is the tracking with storms. If 1966 came during an active hurricane cycle, and 1999 was known for a flurry of storms, including Hurricane Floyd, which at one point posed the biggest such threat in recorded history, the shootings in Virginia arrived in the very midst of a huge "nor'easter."
If nothing else, the shootings tell us much about the storms in our culture. It is a culture immersed in violence. It's a culture immersed in hatred. It's a culture that has devalued life. John Paul himself -- speaking in Denver, not far from Columbine, to youth -- called it a "culture of death."
No one can keep a straight face and say that all those television shows and movies by big-name actors that portray killings are not responsible in some part and perhaps in the main part for the mentality of a crazed person who chooses to go along with what seems like the way to do things histrionically.
All actors who glorify the spray of bullets and the spilling of blood owe 33 sets of parents an apology.
All who favor the killing of the unborn should send flowers.
All who devalue life through cloning, through sexual manipulation, through gender confusion, through genetic experimentation, through euthanasia, through war, and through an obsession with sex should order a bouquet.
This is about lust and anger at a time when our youth are taught to act out lust and anger.
There are not only the movies with unspeakable acts but also advertisements for them for all to see on billboards.
At Columbine, there was a clear connection between the killings and a dark music with occult undertones. They even listened to Marilyn Manson -- a self-professed satanist and "musician." Expect to see some kind of macabre aspect in the background of the current suspect.
And be cautious about what comes next. Another sign of the times is the way the killing at Virginia Tech shocked because of the sheer number and at the same time was something we could integrate readily because we are used to hearing about body counts and explosions and abductions and outrageous serial crimes every day.
The antidote to violence is Christ and without Him more mayhem will follow and events will reach a boiling point.
Strange it is that Virginia Tech is located in Blacksburgh, Virginia -- home of one of America's most notorious serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas.
Ironic it was too that in the year of the Whitman shootings at that other college in Texas an unusual storm hit, traveling all the way from Africa to the U.S. and then up past Canada, to the Arctic.
Unusual indeed, and it was called Hurricane Faith.
4/17/07
[see also: The culture of hatred]
Beneath Horrid Event At Virginia Tech May Be, As Usual, Deep Spiritual Current
Second story
As always, there was the spiritual aspect.
There was the student who turned over two or three desks and shielded himself behind them as the Virginia Tech gunman fired at his class. The student prayed and survived and told national television audiences -- you've seen him -- that he made it "by the Grace of God."
It was a term we heard, on this campus, where so many good seem to attend, time and again: by the Grace of God. This is of course where a student named Cho Seung Hui shot and killed 32 fellow students Monday, and then himself.
There were the profiles in courage. There was the other young man who had been cowering as shots rang out but who mustered the strength to get up and barricade a door -- saving 11 lives.
There was the elderly professor, a Holocaust survivor, who took bullets -- who acted as a human shield -- as his students escaped through a window. We recall the words of Jesus: "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).
And, yes, there was the spiritual underside, a young man in urgent need of deliverance.
There it was on TV: the glazed darkness in his eyes.
Too often, we obscure spiritual aspects with psychology.
The signs of spiritual oppression were evident.
"He was always really, really quiet and kind of weird, keeping to himself all the time,” a room-mate told The New York Times. “Just of anti-social, didn’t talk to anybody. I tried to make conversation with him in August or so and he would just give one word answers and not try and carry on the conversation.” He said it was a creepy quietness. “I would notice a lot of times, I would come in the room and he would kind of be sitting at his desk, just staring at nothing,” he said.
It is said that he was a man "obsessed." Over and again, he played a song, "Shine," from an alternative rock grunge group called Collective Soul, according to room-mates (who barely spoke with him). The lyrics may reflect Cho Seung Hui's spiritual hunger, his search, his desperation:
Give me a word
Give me a sign
Show me where to look
Tell what will I find ( will I find )
Lay me on the ground
Fly me in the sky
Show me where to look
Tell me what will I find ( will I find )
It is almost a Gospel tune and is on an album called "Hints, Allegations, and Things Unsaid."
On Cho's arm was
found the name "Ismael
Ax." Ismael is another version of the Hebrew name Yishma'el, meaning "God will
hear."
And then there are the deeper mysteries or potential ones.
Virginia Tech is located in Blacksburg, Virginia, slightly northeast of an earlier frontier settlement dating from 1748 called Draper's Meadow, the site of the infamous "Draper's Meadow Massacre" of 1755, whereby Shawnees attacked settlers. Burial sites dot the area.
Do spirits linger?
Blacksburg was also hometown to one of history's most notorious serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to involvement in hundreds of murders (if his confessions could be believed). Can we draw lines here? Are there really spiritual atmospheres?
Whatever the case, there is strangeness.
But above that, there is the shining light of those courageous kids.
Hours after witnessing one of the most horrendous events in American annals, they were there bravely telling what happened, bravely testifying to the Grace of God.
There were prayer circles. There was thanksgiving for those who were saved. Already, students on campus have announced that they have forgiven the killer. Was he "schizophrenic"? Or possessed?
It was a watershed day, and the best question was posed by a mother whose daughter was in the hall at the time of the killings.
"She saw the shooter and officers
running by, heard the gunfire, and was ordered to leave her classroom and head
for shelter outside the building," wrote this viewer. "She said she was the only
student that did not have a car to get into to leave the parking lot as
instructed. As she was trying to find shelter in the open lot amidst chaos she
told me she felt she was going to die. My immediate response to her was: 'Were
you ready?'"
We can all ask ourselves that -- are we ready? -- and whether, like that
professor, whose name was Liviu Librescu, we would lay down our lives.
4/18/07
previously published as virginiatech2
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