When Horror Happens

There are moments when words feel almost intrusive ... when speaking at all,

risks diminishing what has been lost. The killing of ten people at a school in the small community of Tumbler Ridge is one of those moments.

In a place where lives are closely woven, the grief is not abstract; it moves through families, classrooms, and daily routines that will never quite return to what they were.

I have no answers to offer. I do not believe this kind of loss yields to explanation, and I am wary of any language that rushes to comfort without first standing still in sorrow.

The poem that follows was written to bear witness to our humanity in these moments of truth. It is an attempt to locate meaning not in reasons, but in the human responses that endure when cruelty has done its worst: remembrance, tenderness, and the quiet resolve to keep loving. It is my struggle with understanding how the presence of God wraps around such scenarios.

If there is anything sacred to be found here, I suspect it lives in those small, faithful acts prompted by deep love, the kind that Jesus modelled eons ago. They are summoned by a beautiful caring essence 'love your neighbour as yourself', even when today's world no longer knows the Source.

When horror happens

there are no proper words.

Language breaks like glass

in our mouths.

We speak, and it cuts us.

Children are gone.

Not ideas.

Not headlines.

Children.

And the world tilts ...

as if gravity itself

cannot carry the weight of

what has occurred.

We ask the old questions

with new rawness:

How can this be?

Where was protection?

What kind of world allows this?

These questions are not anger.

They are love

refusing to turn away,

trying to understand.

We invoke the Holy Presence, God.

He does not rush to explain.

He draws near.

We beg his intervention

with rusty prayers

and awkward words.

He sits in the broken place,

bearing witness,

holding together the tenuous threads

of this lost and fallen generation.

This Holy One is not offended

by our rage or our weeping.

The Psalms taught us this ...

that prayer can be a cry,

a protest,

a pounding on heaven’s door

with bare hands.

With holy help we find meaning

not in reasons,

but in resistance:

resisting numbness,

resisting despair,

resisting the lie

that cruelty is all there is.

We speak the children’s names,

tears softly falling ...

as we entrust them

to a mercy wider

than our understanding.

And if peace comes at all,

we find it slowly ...

not as forgetting,

but as a quiet steadiness:

that love still binds us,

that goodness still calls us,

that we are not alone

in our grief.

When horror happens,

it's never anger that is the answer.

It is the Holy Presence of God ...

helping us stay human

in the face of what tries

to undo us.