A response to the Littleton shootings

by Father Steven Kozler

On April 20, 1999, we were shocked by the tragic murders at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The media, after covering the initial carnage and the eyewitness accounts of the shootings then began to focus on the reason for such an horrific happening. The question posed was something akin to this: "How could such a violent massacre happen in such a place as Littleton, which is upper middle-class, predominately white, and full of people who are concerned about good family values?"

I would pose a question is response: "Why doesn't the same thing that happened in Littleton happen more often in nice, white, upper middle-class, suburban communities?" In other words, why do we think that such communities are not susceptible to the violence that plagues much of our society?

We in America continue to believe that the privileged, the rich, those in nice suburban homes are better off than those that aren't. Rather, we might even think that they, as often being better educated, are also more moral than those not so privileged. It is as if unconsciously we apply the old Calvinistic theorem, that those who are the "elect" are proven so by their wealth and status in life. Indeed, is this not our American thinking? Those who are wealthy, great successes, popular celebrities, are in some measure better humans...people to whom we look up, and aspire to be?

How few of us would consider the blue-collar garbage man, or the assembly worker, or a simple carpenter as someone worthy of our adoration and praise? And yet it was a simple carpenter whom we now call "God," and who transformed the face of this world through His teachings of love and death upon a cross.

Why do we consider the more privileged as more moral? And why conversely, do we not consider them more in need of our pity and prayers? Did not our Lord say that "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God"? (Mt. 19:24) And did not our Lord find in the less fortunate, the sinners, and the outcasts a more willing ear and a more open heart to the Gospel?

All sin is love perverted, said St. Augustine. And nowhere perhaps is love more twisted than in white suburban America, where the teachings of the Gospel are made comfortable and subservient to the American Dream of success, fortune and fame. The fact of the matter is that there are few places as spiritually bankrupt and lonely as an American upper middle-class neighborhood. Sure, the people in such communities are good neighbors, nice people, who keep their lawns well manicured. But so many of these people have been sold an empty world which promises happiness through success but never delivers.

Few things disturb an adolescent mind as much as duplicity and dishonesty...promises left null and void. This is indeed the source of much adolescent angst when the one-time child is faced with an adult world infinitely more complicated and dishonest than had previously been imagined. Idealism is confronted with reality, oftentimes with disappointing results.

We now live in a culture in which truth is relative and inconsequential; where personal desire has been deified; and where violence is lauded as meaningful and an appropriate way of resolving conflict. Mix this all together with the petty poison of upper middle-class vanity and emptiness and it is not difficult at all to not only imagine that such a tragic occurrence as in Littleton could happen, but even that it must eventually happen.

Is the situation hopeless? Yes and no. Yes, it is hopeless as long as the solution to such problems are sought outside the context of the cross and the message of the Gospel. And no, it is not hopeless, as long as we in our own way remain servants to the Gospel, refuse to deify our culture, and remain faithful to the teachings and worship of our Orthodox Church. It is so easy to place the teaching of our culture above the teaching of the Church, easy to take our children to an extracurricular event instead of a church service, or purchase an item of luxury rather than give to the poor. It is easy to buy the "American Dream" since it ultimately gratifies the desire that would make us our own gods. Few things in and of themselves are bad or evil, but each time we sublimate the Gospel to the teaching of our culture, each time we make our own desires more important than the desires of God we contribute to the problem, rather than to the solution.

Let us then be members of the solution: "salt for the earth" (Mt. 5:13), leaven for "the whole lump" (Gal. 5:9), "light of the world" (Mt. 5:14) by embracing the teaching of Christ and holding firm to our faith; being ever mindful all the while that though we walk this earth now and are called to transform it in the light of God's love, our true home is elsewhere. Indeed, we are enjoined to sojourn in this culture, this society, this land, as once was spoken about the Christians in the second century: "Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign land." (Letter to Diognetus, 5.5)

(Fr. Steven Kozler is Rector of St. Nicholas Church in Norwich, Connecticut)