IT IS not much more than a month since 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 building when the shooting took place. It was a little too close to home for me to be able quickly to process and absorb, in the way that we all tend to absorb — and somehow forgive — yet another routine gun crime taking place at a safe distance from where we live.
For the parents whose children were either killed or wounded, it is even harder. None of us can be expected to move immediately to a place of forgiveness. All of us need time to process the experience, and what we feel about the shooter. There are ways and means of doing this.
It might help to begin from a place of owning that the shooter was also someone’s grandson, someone’s son or brother, and to “stand” with his relatives in what they are experiencing. The Greek word for “stand” is rooted in the word stauros, meaning “cross”. But the fact that the word is etymologically linked to the cross does not necessarily imply presuming that forgiveness is automatically to be expected from Christians. Forgiveness takes time. We move in circles as we process grief and shock and try to forgive, or at least to make sense of, what happened. However we go about it, we are 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 perhaps still feel now.
There is no escape from this seemingly endless cycle of returning to and, at the same time, shunning the moment in anger or bewilderment; but we have no choice except to return to this place of raw emotions. We must “stand” in the event that causes them if the process of acceptance leading to forgiveness is to begin.
“STANDING” requires a kind of stubborn acceptance of the reality of what has occurred. It is also bound up with the idea of forgiveness. For some of us who have been affected by the Brown shooting, the harsh reality is that, for once, this particular cataclysmic event has not happened to someone else in some distant place. It has happened to us, or to someone close to us.
The closeness of the experience, as we revisit it, might make those who lost a child or grandchild question the meaning and purpose of an abstracted kind of forgiveness in such a context. What can standing at the foot of the cross have to say to these 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 automatically to forgive could even be seen as an affront, unless it is rooted in a companionship of solidarity, as the individual wrestles with the need to forgive alongside Christ, who must have wrestled with it to the very end. The need to forgive comes from a sense of knowing that forgiveness, however it 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 reality of the situation and so accepting it, puts into question the need for forgiveness itself. Perhaps all that is required is acceptance. Or you might 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 often imagined, the kind of forgetting that comes with the forgiveness of the cross is of a quite different order. You do not airbrush an event like the Brown shooting from your consciousness, even if, in time, you forget the details of the day. For those who were traumatised by being directly caught up in the event, this may never happen. So, it will need to be a different kind of “forgetting” for them. They will need to be able to relocate the moment, and — as in my granddaughter’s case — the seven terrifying hours of lockdown in an adjacent building that followed it. They will need to relocate it in the place of the cross.
At first, this will seem like hard work: a tedious spiritual exercise that bears no relation to the reality of what took place on 13 December 2025. They may give up, exasperated, before they have given themselves enough time to encounter the one who “stands” alongside them in their memories of that particular day, and in the roller-coaster of emotions that accompanies all of our efforts to forgive in such a situation.
We lurch from feeling that we are on top of it, that we have “nailed” it, to blank despair, and back again to seething resentment, and even anger — anger directed at ourselves for not being able readily to forgive; at the organisation whose lax security may have contributed to the event itself, to being made to feel that we, somehow, “ought” to forgive. The “standing” of the cross is meant to hold us firm, to anchor us in the storm of our memories and of these conflicting emotions. It is not meant to oblige us to forget them.
Perhaps the one thing that will 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” in the private hell that he must have created for himself and that drove him to such an action. 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 author, and a priest in the Church in Wales.
