Life & death at a distance
Anderson, Chris
THE LAST WORD LIFE & DEATH AT A DISTANCE Chris Anderson I was walking on the bluff be-yond the seminary, as I often do now that I am studying theology. There is a rutted road and then a path...
...And the gaps between shots-those gaps as I opened my lunch and took out my sandwich-were the children running across the lawn, scrambling away into the flowers...
...What can this possibly mean...
...The grandmother was only slightly wounded, but the rest-the mother and those three little girls-were dead...
...The constant death of children everywhere denies the Christian claim of the love that so redeems the world...
...From beneath the trees I look out over the brow of the seminary hill to the wide fields of the valley floor...
...Von Balthasar would connect the two moments in a more profound way...
...I can't make it mean anything...
...What do we do with this...
...The risen Lord is the one who was crucified...
...I threw my apple core into the brush and read another chapter of von Bal-thasar...
...Was the grandmother begging...
...reminded me of a large book hitting the floor in some adjacent room...
...another man, not much younger, just up the road, hunting down his family with a shotgun...
...Chris Anderson is associate professor of English at Oregon State University...
...The moments feel separate...
...The intellectual and personal pressures that brought me to the seminary remain in force...
...That hot autumn day, as I was on the way to the oak grove, I heard what I later read was the first of several shotgun blasts...
...It's only a little more difficult to argue in the opposite direction, explaining away the unexplainable with pieties about heaven and forgiveness: Christ has a special place for the little children...
...And then the first of the sirens started whining...
...The next blast (a minute or so later...
...But I can tell you how it seems to me...
...The loss is abstract for me only because I received it at my little distance, up in the tower of my private thoughts and needs...
...It's not hard to read a coincidence this horrible as still another example of Christianity's impotence...
...There is a rutted road and then a path through the blackberry hummocks and dry grasses to an oak grove where I sit and watch the birds...
...In a way the answers are too easy...
...Who was lost in thought...
...Who was kneading dough or sweeping the floor...
...They won't fit together in my mind...
...I came into the grove and sat down and ate my lunch...
...I felt as if I were in a tower looking down on the people and movements below me-the seminary hill is about three hundred feet high- except that I was listening instead of looking because a wall of alder and fir blocked my view of the trucks screaming below...
...And yet the sense of the horror of the murders remains in force, too, however muffled...
...The oaks broke the sun into shadows and the birds came, as they always do...
...I still walk out to the oak grove and the theology stills drains away...
...There were these two moments one day in the fall: a man walking out into the fields and thinking about theology...
...A fire...
...Christ conquered death by first enduring it, he would say...
...Who was watching the birds...
...In the next minute I may have heard the next two shotgun blasts-I'm not sure-since another siren, and then another, and then a dozen fire trucks and police cars started up and began intersecting somewhere close by...
...Each blast I heard walking to the oaks and looking out at the fields was the sound of death sudden and senseless and horrible...
...The sound came from far enough away to be muffled, indistinct...
...This year he is studying at Mount Angel Seminary...
...I was only curious...
...I wonder, on the day of the Crucifixion, what was going on in the rooms and streets and the fields nearby...
...He and his family live in Corvallis, Oregon...
...in all their innocence they are now playing on the grassy slopes of paradise...
...Lower down, chickadees bicker and flute...
...The last one, a baby, he shot in his mother-in-law's arms before a neighbor dragged him to the sidewalk...
...then in turn murdered each of his three little children...
...My vague and restless faith is just as vague and restless as ever, no less secure than before the blasts and the sirens, no more resolved...
...The horror was in the paper the next day: An estranged husband, distraught and angry, had gunned down his wife on the lawn of their house in the little town of Scotts Mills, about five miles up the road...
...Soon the abstraction and intensity of the morning's lectures start draining out of me...
...Christianity doesn't deny suffering but embraces it...
...I didn't think much of it...
...A downy woodpecker is always going about its work in the upper branches...
Vol. 123 • March 1996 • No. 5
