Click to hide HTML preview
In the coming days you will have opportunities to be light on this campus,
in your small groups, in your apartments, in your classrooms, by helping
people process the Virginia Tech shootings. Students are asking questions
and probably more open to having faith conversations right now. Please take
this time to be a resource to your dorm floors, your student clubs on
campus, your classes, your small groups as people who may not have any more
answers, but have some sense of hope, and access to a God who is all
powerful when we are powerless, who is all present when we are far removed,
hundreds of miles away.
I imagine all of you are in different places of engagement with the
shootings, and your responses are reflective of the larger campus—a
mixture of apathy and sadness, anger, confusion, or just lack of thoughts
or feelings about it. This is appropriate. But as leaders, you also have
been chosen to lead out when unexpected things happen (for such a time as
this). Please try to stay engaged in this time, and if you have questions,
I am free to help you process it.
Here is just a resource for you if you are leading a discussion with folks
about it.
Structure:
1. Open with emphasizing that this is a safe place for people to process
the shooting—whether it’s sharing their feelings or thoughts, or
articulating some questions that they have.
2. Affirm that any response or non-response is appropriate (jadedness,
apathy, anger, fear, sadness, conflicted feelings).
Help people to work through possible guilt with not feeling more than they
do.
3. Have people share about when they first heard, and how they
felt/thought. Affirm each person with active listening (example: one
student shared last night that she’d feel guilty crying over these deaths
because there are people dying every day. And it doesn’t do anything to
cry. An active affirmative response would be: “yeah, sometimes it’s hard to
cry for these people because then we don’t know when to stop—there is so
much pain in the world. And sometimes we don’t want to feel things because
they don’t change anything—feelings aren’t productive in the way we want
to be productive.”—DON’T GIVE ANSWERS OR TRY TO TEACH/PREACH. JUST AFFIRM
WHAT YOU HEAR.
4. Fill in with any missing details.
5. Make a case for continued engagement. Help people to engage in ways that
make the shooting more tangible (asking questions like, what would drive
someone to do something like this, or articulating how much mourning and
weeping and wailing has been going on last night, this morning, for days
and weeks and years to come.) Here is what I have been sharing with people:
My own stories of death and funerals this past year. I’ve attended 3
funerals this year already, and the past few years have been full of deaths
around me. I’ve had different levels of engagements in each of these deaths-
-some of them I knew more intimately than others. But with each death, I
have been honored to walk alongside and mourn alongside my friends who have
lost loved ones. I have had the chance to thank the deceased for the
children they have raised, for being a gift to this world. It has linked me
so much more intimately with humanity, and I have mourned that the world is
without them.
Part of why we go to college is to learn what it means to be human, to be
alive. We search for meaning for ourselves, and we come excited to learn
and to be shaped by the college culture, knowing that when we leave, we
will be a different person than when we entered. But somehow, in the thick
of midterms, in the rat race of college, we start to lose sight of that. We
begin to see college as a series of tests, as only academic, and in a
sense, we start to lose a sense of our humanity. We no longer let life
interrupt us. But this week, life has interrupted many people in Virginia.
It has interrupted many roommates, dormmates, floormates, parents,
siblings, grandparents, cousins, childhood friends. Part of being human
means to stand in solidarity with these people. Part of being faithful and
honoring would perhaps be to let life interrupt us for the next 2 hours,
for the next week. To mourn a bit, and to know that the amount of emotion
we feel is only a fraction of what those affected are feeling and will feel
for the rest of their lives.
6. Break the group into smaller groups to respond, according to the felt
needs of the group. After hearing responses to feelings and thoughts, I
created 3 groups:
1 group who engaged more intellectually, and wanted to talk more through
the motives of the shooter, and death in general.
1 group who engaged more emotionally, and wanted to talk through feelings
of safety and violation, mourning the losses, etc.
1 group who wanted to act—what next? What can we do? How could this be
prevented in the future?
Things to keep in mind:
1. Some people may respond initially with their minds, and others initially
with their hearts, and some respond initially with both. Affirm these
things.
2. Apathy is often times a defense mechanism we use so that we don’t have
to feel.
3. We are not trying to manufacture feelings that are not there. But we do
want to honor the deaths, and honor the families and friends who have lost,
because it is a grave loss.
4. It’s been my experience that Berkeley (and the higher the performance
orientation, the more this seems to be true) has a funky perspective of
death. Students don’t tend to enjoy life, so they don’t mourn death as
well.
Click to see HTML preview
