IT IS not way more than a month because the mass shooting at Brown University (News, 19 December). Those of us who were directly affected by it are still feeling the aftershock. I speak as one whose granddaughter was in a neighbouring constructing when the shooting took place. It was somewhat too near home for me to have the option quickly to process and absorb, in the best way that all of us are inclined to absorb — and in some way forgive — one more routine gun crime going down at a secure distance from where we live.
For the parents whose children were either killed or wounded, it’s even harder. None of us could be expected to maneuver immediately to a spot of forgiveness. All of us need time to process the experience, and what we feel concerning the shooter. There are ways and technique of doing this.
It might help to start from a spot of owning that the shooter was also someone’s grandson, someone’s son or brother, and to “stand” together with his relatives in what they’re experiencing. The Greek word for “stand” is rooted within the word stauros, meaning “cross”. But the proven fact that the word is etymologically linked to the cross doesn’t necessarily imply presuming that forgiveness is routinely to be expected from Christians. Forgiveness takes time. We move in circles as we process grief and shock and check out to forgive, or a minimum of to make sense of, what happened. However we go about it, we’re continually returned to the place where we began. We are easily triggered by associations, by reminders of the event, and by how we felt then and maybe still feel now.
There is not any escape from this seemingly limitless cycle of returning to and, at the identical time, shunning the moment in anger or bewilderment; but we have now no selection except to return to this place of raw emotions. We must “stand” within the event that causes them if the strategy of acceptance resulting in forgiveness is to start.
“STANDING” requires a form of stubborn acceptance of the fact of what has occurred. It can be sure up with the thought of forgiveness. For a few of us who’ve been affected by the Brown shooting, the tough reality is that, for once, this particular cataclysmic event has not happened to another person in some distant place. It has happened to us, or to someone near us.
The closeness of the experience, as we revisit it, might make those that lost a toddler or grandchild query the meaning and purpose of an abstracted form of forgiveness in such a context. What can standing on the foot of the cross must say to those families, or to the family of the one who did the shooting and who ended by taking his own life?
In such circumstances, the implied challenge routinely to forgive could even be seen as an affront, unless it’s rooted in a companionship of solidarity, as the person wrestles with the necessity to forgive alongside Christ, who should have wrestled with it to the very end. The must forgive comes from a way of knowing that forgiveness, nonetheless it really works, is more for our own health than for the well-being of the one who has wounded us. This returns us to the word stauros: Christ “standing” in solidarity with us.
YOU might say that merely “standing”, if it simply implies facing into the fact of the situation and so accepting it, puts into query the necessity for forgiveness itself. Perhaps all that’s required is acceptance. Or you may have assumed, until now, that forgiveness means putting the event and the pain that it causes behind you by forgetting it.
But, contrary to what is commonly imagined, the form of forgetting that comes with the forgiveness of the cross is of a quite different order. You don’t airbrush an event just like the Brown shooting out of your consciousness, even when, in time, you forget the small print of the day. For those that were traumatised by being directly caught up within the event, this may occasionally never occur. So, it can should be a distinct form of “forgetting” for them. They might want to have the option to relocate the moment, and — as in my granddaughter’s case — the seven terrifying hours of lockdown in an adjoining constructing that followed it. They might want to relocate it within the place of the cross.
At first, this may look like exertions: a tedious spiritual exercise that bears no relation to the fact of what took place on 13 December 2025. They may surrender, exasperated, before they’ve given themselves enough time to come across the one who “stands” alongside them of their memories of that individual day, and within the roller-coaster of emotions that accompanies all of our efforts to forgive in such a situation.
We lurch from feeling that we’re on top of it, that we have now “nailed” it, to blank despair, and back again to seething resentment, and even anger — anger directed at ourselves for not having the ability readily to forgive; on the organisation whose lax security could have contributed to the event itself, to being made to feel that we, in some way, “ought” to forgive. The “standing” of the cross is supposed to carry us firm, to anchor us within the storm of our memories and of those conflicting emotions. It just isn’t meant to oblige us to forget them.
Perhaps the one thing that may help us to heal from the Brown shooting is “standing” with the shooter’s own parents and grandparents; and even, if possible, imagining and “standing” within the private hell that he should have created for himself and that drove him to such an motion. Feelings of forgiveness may or may not surface out of such an exercise, but feelings, in God’s economy, are of secondary importance. It is the “standing” that counts.
The Revd Dr Lorraine Cavanagh is an writer, and a priest within the Church in Wales.
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