I’ll tell you my worst nightmare.
My son sits nestled into the middle of a church pew on a Wednesday morning, his uniformed schoolmates packed in beside him.
It’s his third day of school. Tentative and self-conscious by nature, he feels his peers’ eyes from the pews behind him; he scrunches in close to keep his legs and arms from touching his neighbors.
He’s thinking about so many things at once: his new teacher, which table he’s going to eat his lunch at, what he’ll play at recess, how much he misses the summer, but also how he loves his fresh notebooks and pencils.
And then he looks up at the stained-glass windows along the side of the church: St. Matthew with his quill, St. Peter with his key, and finally the Little Flower, St. Therese of Lisieux, whom he’s always instinctively loved.
In his heart, he’s prompted to kneel, which he does, knowing that he’ll draw some unwanted attention to himself and risk being the pious one. And in my dream, as I watch this, I think of the first time he kneeled beside me for bedtime prayer and clasped his hands, just as his mother and I do. I’m so proud of him at that moment, my heart might burst.
And then he glances back up at the stained-glass. That’s when the bullets fly through, and I wake up in a panic.
So much will be said about today’s shooting at a Catholic K-8 school in Minnesota, especially regarding the shooter’s motives and our sick and fallen culture’s role in fostering them. There will also be plenty said about gun laws and school security. All necessary and important.
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But for today, I find the only useful thing to say is that, as a father, as a Catholic raising his son in the faith, this has broken my heart. It has broken all of our hearts. The words “mourning” and “grieving” feel inadequate. We are broken today.
And in the time and place of his choosing, may God put us all back together.