Friday, April 20, 2007
Virginia Tech
Wednesday evening on the IU South Bend campus, as on many college campuses across the nation, a candlelight vigil was held in memory of the students and teachers who were shot to death Monday morning at Virginia Tech. I stood beneath the fringe of the canopy that sheltered the small podium, the several musicians, and the crowd of students, faculty, administrators, and staff. Cradling our candles, we huddled together against a cold, damp wind. The simple event included prayers, songs, and brief statements of condolence and solidarity. One student who had lost a high school friend in the Virginia tragedy told us about the promises he had made to his friend and vowed to continue the friendship. He was, in a sense, a direct lifeline to the grieving campus.
Those of us who spend a lot of time on college campuses know the classrooms and leafy quadrangles as almost sacred spaces. In every city, in an act of civic responsibility, we have set aside space for colleges and universities. These spaces, whether squeezed among tall buildings or sprawled along rivers or over hills, largely exist apart from the rough and tumble world of commercial activity. Even the hallways and lawns are places of contemplation, discussion, learning, friendship, and love. If a high school is a containment zone, a college is a realm of freedom, the long-awaited reward of young adulthood. An air of innocence pervades the college scene, and I think we all believe in this innocence, even after considering what we know about binge drinking and several other endemic problems. Symbolically, the university will always be a world apart. That is a good, a necessary thing.
The violent, disturbed student who used a handgun to kill so many members of his university family succeeded in shattering, for a moment, the peace that nurtures all of us in the halls of higher learning. The candlelight vigils serve several purposes, the most subtle being that of healing the emotional environment of university life. We come together not for ourselves exactly, and not only in memory of others, but also as a way of reaffirming the power of peace and understanding that is the foundation of every university and the essential spirit of every college campus.
Another purpose relies on a belief that is magical, or religious, if you will—namely, a belief in spiritual communication. Hence the reliance on prayer and music in our attempt to communicate across great distances to the families of the victims and even across the distance that separates the mournful present from the unsuspecting past and the living from the dead. This effort, too, is necessary. In the moment of speaking, in the act of crying or of singing, something happens.
A terrifying killing spree of the kind witnessed at Blacksburg, Virginia, is as rare and unpredictable as an earthquake or tornado. We understand the potential, we recognize the ingredients, we can prepare in several ways, but our ability to prevent a tragic outcome is limited by the peculiar circumstances of a unique event. And we are frail, imperfect. Even the police officers among us are only human. In the end, we are all subject to grief. How we grieve and how we remember and how we survive—how committed we are to the principles that make life worth living—that is what matters most.