"Some acts resist comprehension..."
Rev. Gary Kowalski
A Remembrance Service for the Knoxville Victims
First Unitarian Universalist Society of Burlington, VT
July 28, 2008
Some acts resist comprehension, like yesterday’s shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, where two people died and seven others seriously injured.
Deeds that defy understanding also defy words. The attack was a senseless burst of violence, an outrage on humanity, a crime that has left hundreds shaken and grieving. It was all of these, but more, a bewildering assault on reason, order, and the mind’s ability to fathom as well as on flesh and blood.
Yesterday’s events were especially frightening because they seemed to be an intentional targeting of our faith. Police Chief Sterling Owen revealed at a press conference this morning that the assailant had been hatching his plot for at least a week, deliberately choosing a liberal congregation when picking his victims—a church known for it’s progressive stands on racial justice and women’s equality and especially for its embrace of lesbians and gays. When our values, our convictions, our commitment to freedom and diversity come under assault, we realize that none of us are entirely safe.
Living by principle becomes a risky proposition.
The killings in Knoxville, too, remind us of the seeming imbalance between good and evil in our world. A lone gunman, driven by bigotry and the worst kind of intolerance, was able to enter a sanctuary filled with two hundred people, children and adults, and bring chaos to an entire community. Festivity was turned to ashes in an instant. There is an apparent disproportion between the forces of destruction and the forces that uphold and sustain life.
And yet our presence this evening signifies a deeper truth: that while one deranged man can make headlines, dozens of people, hundreds of people, thousands of people in churches all across this land are coming together in services like this one, gay and straight, black and white, men and women to honor the dead, to pray for the injured, and to bear witness to the inherent worth of each person that connects us in time of loss and enables us to rise above such random acts of violence in hope and courage and renewed commitment to the ideals that give meaning to existence, even at times when that meaning seems hard to grasp.
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Last updated on Thursday, June 3, 2010.
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