Under the proposed new system, still in its preliminary planning stages, police officers trained to recognize symptoms of mental illness could have arrested Mitchell and brought him in to be evaluated by their station’s mental health expert, or the department’s mental evaluation team. Three weeks later, the same shotgun was found with two other weapons beside Mitchell’s lifeless body in the second-floor room from which he fired his deadly fusillade. Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, a comic novel about an older Anne Frank, questions the role of optimism in Jewish history and tradition. In fact, just two months before the schoolyard shooting, police responding to a “family-dispute” call confiscated a shotgun from Mitchell but had to return it to him in February when his uncle refused to press charges. Talk to Fecaline the Wise at Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley is the ultimate insider admission of a secret global elite that has impacted nearly. But Mitchell was prosecuted only once-for firing a gun into the air-and spent only four days in jail. Inspiration for this week’s banner image: The genius of Jesus’ teaching is that he reveals that God uses tragedy, suffering, pain, betrayal, and death itself, not to wound us but, in fact, to bring us to a Larger Identity: “Unless the single grain of wheat loses its shell, it remains just a single grain” (see John 12:24).Police had been called to the Mitchell home several times in the years before the shooting, in response to reports from relatives and neighbors that Mitchell was threatening them or firing weapons into the air at passing airplanes. Image credit: Wheat Field With Crows (detail), Vincent van Gogh, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. But we are not the Doer.Īdapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (CAC Publishing: 2017), 83–85. God alone, it seems to me, can hold together all the seeming opposites and contradictions of life. Such acceptance allows us to sit in some degree of contentment-despite all the warring evidence. God allows us to bring “on earth what is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10) every time we can allow, receive, and forgive the conflicts of the moment. Contemplation is living in a unified field that produces in people a deep, largely non-rational, and yet calmly certain hope, which is always a surprise.Ī life of inner union, a contemplative life, is practicing for heaven now. Did you ever think of God as suffering? Most people don’t-but Jesus came to change all of that.Īny form of contemplation is a gradual sinking into this divine fullness where hope lives. The Gospel gives our suffering both personal and cosmic meaning by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very pain of God. Somehow hope provides its own kind of meaning, in a most mysterious way. The ego demands successes to survive the soul needs only meaning to thrive. The virtue of hope, with great irony, is the fruit of a learned capacity to suffer wisely, calmly, and generously. This deserves a major “Wow!” because mere philosophy or even proper theology would never have come to this conclusion. Jesus hangs right there amid them, not even perfectly balancing them, but just holding them (see Ephesians 2:13–22). It seems there is a cruciform shape to reality with cross purposes, paradoxes, and conflicting intentions everywhere. If we try too hard to understand it, we will stop the process or steer it in the wrong direction. Such growth must largely be hidden because God alone can see it and steer it for our good. Necessary suffering allows us to grow, but “in secret” (Mark 4:26–29), which is an amazingly common concept, both in the teachings of Jesus and of many of the mystics. The saints variously called such suffering deaths, nights, darkness, unknowing, spiritual trials, or just doubt itself. The soul must walk through such suffering to go higher, further, deeper, or longer. When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world-and do not spend our lives running from it-we will encounter various forms of “crucifixion.” Pain is physical or emotional discomfort, but suffering often comes from our resistance to that pain.
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