“Behavior of such cunning cruelty that only a human being

could have thought of or contrived it we call “inhuman,”

revealing thus some pathetic ideal standard for our

species that survives all betrayals.”

-Rose Macauley

As with most of you, the violent spree that took the lives of 15 people in Columbine High School has had a way of haunting me in the nearly 2 weeks now since it occurred. It has been virtually impossible to escape, and even when we might have succeeded for a few hours to put it out of our minds, some crack in our consciousness allows it to seep back in. Sadly, of course, this is not the first such incident. Jonesboro, Peduchah, and Springfield all preceded Littleton, and before anyone had any idea who the perpetrators were in Littleton, most of us could have sketched out their profiles: male, white, students at that school, middle-class -at least-, somehow on the fringe, and of course, well armed. It goes without saying that they would be psychologically and emotionally damaged. Sure enough, as details started to filter in, that’s who they turned out to be. Except for their final hours, to an outside observer at least, they carried on through their teen-age years alot like most teen-agers always have: secretive from parents, challenging of conventions, underachieving in the classroom, some trouble with the police, alternatively moody and angry at a world that really doesn’t understand them. Oh, sure, looking back, lots of people are now able to see how the handwriting was on the wall. But clearly, no one must have ever imagined that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, would be the source of such terror in the lives of so many. Lots of things have been written in the last 10 days about the fact that somehow, someone SHOULD have imagined it....the parents, the school, the police, the boys friends. But they didn’t. I wonder, could we?

As many of you may know from reading the newsletter, I had planned to preach a sermon this morning on the concept of the sabbath as a worthy practice to integrate into our own lives. Then ‘Time’ Magazine arrived this Tuesday. The cover story was of course, Littleton. Under the smiling faces of Klebold and Harris’ senior class yearbook pictures, was the title, “The Monsters Next Door”. I thought it a misguided and irresponsible use of hyperbole to attribute their actions to their being something other than the human beings they were. If they are monsters, than so am I, and so are you. The problem is not that they were monsters, it is that they were human. And that is so much more painful to accept. It prompted me to make a rare change in my announced topic. The sabbath will have to wait for another day. My sermon this morning will be shorter than usual, because I would like to use some of the time we have together in community reflection, with a focus not on what other people outside of these walls ought to do about the gravity of these events, but rather about what we here can be doing as a spiritual community to serve our religious principles of peace, justice, and compassion. How can we end the violence and even brutality, mostly emotional, that happens even in relationships in our church and in our families? These are very hard and painful questions, for which I have ideas, but no complete answers. I feel we needed an opportunity to sit with these questions, together in reflection, here in this community where hearts are open to grasp all that unifies us this morning; our griefs, our fears, our pain, and even our hidden monstrous selves.

Predictably, since that day of horror, there has been no end to the search for a sturdy enough scape-goat to carry the weight of these killings. They are familiar to us in the wake of similar acts of violence among young people, be they black kids in the ghetto, hillbillies in Kentucky, or suburban kids in BMW’s. For various reasons, some people hold one theory or the other as the reason these horrors happen. The most obvious target for the culture to address is the proliferation of guns. Not hunting weapons. Not even pistols. But guns that have no purpose or function other than killing as many people as possible with as little effort as possible. . Some have suggested that if MORE people had guns the two boys in Colorado would have been stopped by an armed teacher, custodian, or librarian at the school. A logical argument, perhaps, but one that breaks down when we comprehend the environment of fear that would create at every turn. The problem of too many guns is unlikely to be solved with more guns. Perhaps something will change in terms of gun control because of the killings in Colorado, but as helpful as that might be in reducing gun violence, we have to be honest in our appraisal of its impact on the symptoms of violence, and it’s relative impotence in addressing the causes of violence which move people to hurt each other.

The parents have been accused of negligence, and by association, the general culture of the family in America. We can know little about the inner relationship these parents had to their children, but it is safe to assume that they didn’t spend alot of time with their teen-age boys. That is usually how teen-agers want it to be, and I should add, the only way many parents of teens stay sane. It’s part of the script of growing up. They may have been too permissive. They may have spoiled them. They may have failed to discipline them. Or on the other hand, they might have abused them, they might have neglected them. They might have been horrible parents. But lots of people have horrible parents and manage to keep from going on a killing spree.

Next in line for blame is “the media”. Another target of ample dimensions. Between television, movies, and video games, all of us are brought in contact with endless images of violence. Does anyone care to guess how many murders a child has seen in all media by the end of their years in elementary school? (8,000) That’s more than two murders a day, for everyday, of their whole lives. The generations growing up today, will have ingested so much more violence than any of us over 30 could ever have imagined. Will that shape their valuing of human life? Will that glorify aspirations of revenge? Will that diminish their sense of compassion? Will that dull their sense of alternatives to violence in their own lives? Probably, for some it will. We know for some, it already has.

The Internet is a recent entry into the equation. Now any crackpot with a bag of fertilizer and a fuse can find a recipe to blow up a building just by going on line. We know these kids in Littleton used the Internet as a source of “inspiration”, if I dare call it that, and for promoting their own little outpost of outrage and despair at being ridiculed by others at school. Every information revolution has its costs. Had they known what it was to yield, the feudal lords would probably have banned the printing press, as it would come to share knowledge in such a way that would end the social structure that permitted their oppression of others. The Internet does not create violent ideas or invent instructions for agents of destruction. It merely distributes them. And it is too late to call them back.

Though it has not been widely discussed, I think that the police - not the particular police in Littleton who might have overlooked some strong indications of at least Eric Harris’ smothering rage - but the police in general have not always been worthy role models. Cases of police brutality are far too common. Swat team tactics may be effective, but they demonstrate a kind of extreme force that is glorified and alluring. The case of Ammadu Diallo in New York City two months ago, where 4 policemen fired 41 shots at an unarmed man in the entryway of his apartment building was such a dreadful event, and though it is likely that the officers will be suitably disciplined, what will linger in the imaginations of so many whose hearts are filled with rage, is the unbridled exercise of force that even the police let loose. You and I know the difference between all the good cops and the few bad ones. But for someone wanting to rationalize their behavior, it’s a ready excuse for unleashing their own rage.

Other cultural targets, which I’ll lump together, are the schools and religion. (Not because I think they ought to be, but because so many others link them together.) The premise, of course, is that schools have become moral cesspools since pointy headed, atheistic, bureaucrats took God out of the schools. I don’t know much about schools, but I know a little about religion, and it strikes me as rather bizarre theology that God - in almost whatever definition you would care to postulate- would only be present with the permission of the School Boards or at the invitation of prayer groups. What kind of God is that? Would God have stopped Eric and Dylan if the school day at Columbine High had opened that day with a prayer? Schools may suffer from issues of slack discipline, of disrespectful children, and of children without a well developed sense of responsibility or respect. But they don’t make those problems. Those problems walk through the doors every morning in the lives of students, who either have a spiritual foundation or do not, who either have a moral and ethical perspective on life or do not, who either have a glimmer of their own self-respect and self-esteem or do not. If as a society we lack a sense of our relationship to all that is ultimate, which some have called God, it is hardly the fault of the schools. They have a hard enough time helping to make sense of algebra and chemistry.

There are clearly many sources that contribute to events like those that took place in Littleton last week. My intention this morning is not to try to decide which one is worse, which one is most liable, which one is a distraction from more critical issues. They each have serious implications for our culture, and the generations that are having to make their way in a culture in significant distress. I am sure that among us there would be disagreement on which deserve our attention. I’d ask you to set those arguments aside for today. They are forms of social pathologizing that are parallel to describing the killers as, say, monsters. We might feel better, slightly relieved at least, for a few minutes to imagine that Eric and Dylan were monsters. Fascinating and engaging as those kinds of arguments and debates can be, they all too often serve only to distance and distract us from the more elemental issues of our own complicity in the wounding of the world’s soul, and then by implication - of our own responsibility for the healing of the world’s soul.

Each of the issues I raised have an impact on our public life. But at a deeper, inner level, it is hard to dismiss any of them as being unrelated to the gradually diminishing sense of the sacred that has for ages, shaped the human psyche. We have developed technologies that requires fewer relational skills with each other; we live further and further from direct relation with nature, from our fellow creatures, and from the elements; we arrange so many of our relationships in patterns, or hierarchies, of dominance where there must always be winners, and where there are always losers; we reward conformity and often reject the vast diversity that is so deeply embedded in the design of creation. Our challenge is to develop the means and methods by which we can more intentionally cultivate our awareness and our relationship with the sacred dimensions that are present within us and around us. In Unitarian Universalist jargon, its described as “respect for the interdependent web of which we are a part.” But it’s not an original thought. We bring it forth from the essence of the mystical branches of Christianity and Judaism, from much of Buddhist and Hindu thought, as well as from native American spirituality. Living within this “interdependent web”, this sacred fabric where earthworm and human and star are recognized as being linked by the same primal elements, is not something we can do only when it’s convenient for us. We don’t get to demonize mosquitoes, skunks, and killers just because they bring us discomfort and pain. We don’t have to like them, or invite them home with us, but we do have to grant them their place in the universe and their curious and sometimes disturbing relationship to our own place in the order of things.

Rather than being monsters, what we know about human behavior tells us that Harris and Klebold were exhibiting a very elemental human characteristic. For many reasons essential to the evolutionary process, aggression has been a trait selected for the continuation of the human species. We had to fend off saber tooth tigers and woolly mastodons, to say nothing of each other in our quest for territory, resources, mating partners, and food. But over time the fist gave way to the club, to the knife, to the gun. Our genetic instructions, millions of years in the making, are not made to respond to such sudden environmental changes and technological advances. And because of that, our aggressive behavior takes on much worse dimensions when we go after people with an arsenal of automatic weapons than when all we had at our disposal was a good firm stick.

The line between aggression and violence becomes blurred as more and more people move through life feeling, rightly or wrongly, threatened and frustrated by modern mastodons - be they the intractable obstacles of racism, the ever present material reminders of the widening class divide, the terrifying absence of meaning and purpose at our core, or in this case, the presence of an arrogant clique that reveled in excluding the likes of Klebold and Harris.

Let there be no misunderstanding. In no way whatsoever am I excusing any part of what they did. I acknowledge I may not even be right in explaining their particular actions. Here I am making a more general point about the genetic predisposition we all share toward violence. We know that there are cultures - the Amish for example- where murders never occur. But they are the exception, not the rule. Important exceptions, though, as they suggest the role socialization and community norms have on aggression and violence, and the hope they might have in moderating such destructive impulses.

It has gradually become clear to me, for myself at least, that in order to make any sense of the killings that took place in the school I have to open myself to the capacity I too hold to do harm to others, to desire revenge, to retaliate from the pain that I have experienced. My self-control does not negate the reality of those kinds of feelings. In some perverse way, the pain felt by these two boys may have been the source of their desire to be unified with their enemies, and since they could not be unified in love and care, they were unified - all 15 - in indiscriminate pain and fear.

As with the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hahn, we need to be able to recognize within us all our true names, hearing our cries and laughs at once, seeing our joy and pain are in fact all one. We are Isaiah Shoels and we are Dylan Klebold. We are Rachel Scott and we are Eric Harris. We should not accept this dichotomy with ease or with comfort. It should scare the hell out of us. It should humble us, profoundly. For it is laden with some of the most essential spiritual challenges that we will face in this life: those that would require us to keep our hearts open to the condition of pain shared by all who live, and to keep our souls poised and prepared to recognize and respond to the “monster” we each surely carry within. Making Klebold and Harris ‘monsters’ would free us of these complex burdens, and would preserve our fragile and ill-founded innocence. Whether such an event could, or could not, ever occur in our communities seems to miss the most obvious effect of the violence in Littleton: we now live out of the experience of it having happened, be it there or here. Like it or not. we must live as if it has already happened to those who are no different than us, by those much like us, too. Only from that place of compassionate understanding can the healing of the soul of the world, begin.

In invite a moment of two of silence, that we can follow with a time of shared reflection. I would ask that we respect the time and space as part of the worship experience and not as a forum for a debate on gun control, or other political diversions. As I mentioned at the start of the sermon, I believe there is value as a spiritual community to examine first and foremost what it is we here might do, in relation to each other and to our children, to shape the world toward justice, compassion, and love. I believe the wisdom of this community is capable of such vision....