The Elementary School Shooting Today

The highlighting and formatting in the excerpt below is mine:

What, then, of our God?

We read that he weeps over the suffering of his children, that Enoch, who witnesses it, is astonished. After everything he had just seen, and been granted power to do by God, he saw God as the all-powerful sovereign, able to do anything he willed, the God of traditional Judaism and Christianity. But this is troubling for Enoch. Doesn’t God already live in that painless realm of beauty and joy, that very place where we yearn to go and have been promised if we are righteous and law-abiding? When God explains that the heavens weep over suffering due to the sins of humankind he then shows Enoch all of it, all of the wickedness and suffering that God witnesses with ghastly regularity, and now Enoch weeps, and his heart swells wide as eternity, and his bowels yearn and eternity shakes. Enoch experiences, as perhaps no one really had or no one really would in scripture, not Nephi with his vision of the end of his people, not John with his Revelation of the Apocalypse, what it was like to live God’s life, to live and move as he lived and moved, as one who is intensely connected to all the happenings and events and lives of the universe. And oh what joy he did NOT feel from this experience. He weeps bitterly and refuses to be comforted. This could not be it. This could not be all there was for all eternity, worlds without end.

Enoch realizes that the essence of what it would mean become a divine being, to become like God, the heart and core of the the gift of the Good News for humanity, was not to escape to another realm where pain and suffering cannot touch you. It was to develop into a being who would and could endure the present of all moments, in wave after infinite wave of pain, suffering, and wickedness, because this would be, despite the good that humanity would also do and be capable of, the terrible gift of humanity to God.

Frankly, cwald, I’ve avoided reading news articles, as well.

My youngest daughter is 10. Enough said.

To be honest, I don’t really want to hear about it. I’m sorry for all those involved. Dreadful. Happens too often.

I actually know a few folk who know people who were involved in such a massacre near here once. We have a guy in the neighboring ward whose cousin was murdered by her boyfriend (he got mixed up with black magic etc), and her case was sprawled across the papers here. He’s a good lad, but I think you can imagine what his feelings are towards her former boyfriend.

There is one factor that we don’t seem to want to address in the west… which is the pressure cooker situation that seems to lead to these killings. In many cases, it’s not just a matter of spotting the potential troublemaker, I think it’s also a matter of social exclusion of the killer, and even bullying. None of this justifies this kind of behavior, but if we could deal with that kind of thing more effectively we might avoid massacres like this. (Banning guns is only going to solve part of the problem)

PLEASE, everyone, read the actual post I linked.

There is a reason why I linked to it instead of writing a general post about things like this. I would like a thread that talks about the post to which I linked, since I think it is one of the best posts I’ve read – ever – in the five years+ I’ve been reading, commenting and writing in the Bloggernacle.

So where was our loving God yesterday? Was he a no-show?

Free Agency I guess. 😡

What kind of a monster can go into a kindergarden classroom and start shooting crying little kids?

Someone who is mentally ill? The question is, did he know what he was doing, and how did he get to that state?

In the end, if “the winds and the waves shall obey thy will” I don’t know why God didn’t make a tree fall on his house and kill him.

I’d like to know the answer to that, myself. Orthodox Mormon theology would say that we have to see the evil to know the good. Something like that… And there’s the Free Agency thing again.

But do bear in mind that sometimes in history, trees HAVE fallen. Very odd… Did you know that a misidentification on radar nearly caused a nuclear war in the 1980s? We can thank one Soviet technician who happened to be bright enough to realize that American missiles were NOT flying at the USSR. He had to plead with his superiors to stop it. I see God’s hand in that. Can you imagine what life would be like now? If there was any life left?

Maybe we don’t usually notice the trees falling, because they stop events happening. We’d only notice things if the events did happe.

Jacob, I re-read your beautifully written post again today. There’s so much there to ponder, and I’m sure to read it from time to time in my tomorrows. Thank you again for writing it.

I thought the Lord promised we could enter into His rest, that we could rest from the cares and labors of this world. I thought He promised unspeakable joy. I’ve lost half my siblings and 1/3 of all my children spiritually with hardcore rejection of what they perceive as a brainwashing, controlling, and misogynistic church. The pain and grief is non-extinguishable. Perhaps if I continue to keep my beloved covenants, they will find their way home someday in a nebulous hereafter. But I must tell you I have no desire to have spirit children to go through losing 1/3 again before mortality, nor many more during mortality. I’ve had enough pain for many lifetimes well-beyond my families. If exaltation is more pain, suffering and weeping, then how does the Lord invite us to enter into His rest? What rest would that be exactly? I thought it was rest from the cares and labors of this world. The labor isn’t an issue for me. But the cares is how I’ve pressed forward with a perfect brightness of hope. I’ve wept with many others for their sorrows. I’ve put my arms around them when nothing else would do. I’ve listened as they’ve suffered and mourned. Surely, I’ve been God’s ears, arms and a portion of His love. I did this because I thought I was on His delegated errand while He was enjoying Heaven.

I’ve experienced faithful members comments that parents who lose children messed up by being this or that, or not being this or that. I’ve experienced marginalization in lieu of understanding and empathy at various times because of questions I have. Members have oftentimes been the least compassionate or empathetic. They don’t weep for many of others sorrows—they judge them. Sometimes they are quite mean, actually. Is this the rest I may find someday? Will I find your empathy and compassion there, Jacob? Your tears?

My children live, but are lost. They’ve been destroyed by past addictions and secular ideologies and the allure of temporal pleasures and fun. No one weeps for them but me. I have often felt God cares and He sends the Spirit to comfort me. But, honestly, I’ve never once felt He wept. I hope He has a Godlike strength to comfort, guide, and help; but I hope with all my heart He feels no more pain and does not suffer at all any more over any of His children. I hope His and Mother’s tears are only tears of joy.

“Or what’s a Heaven for?”

Jenny, I honestly don’t know what to say concerning your loss. Most words will be anything from totally insufficient to highly inappropriate. But since this is a forum for discussing in comments what is posted, you deserve some kind of response, however inadequate.

As we’ve already seen in previous comments, there are various ways of interpreting the scriptures concerning the nature of the next phase of human existence, after death. I tempered my interpretation a bit in response to Antonio, but I still have a basic personal conviction concerning what I originally wrote. It’s a conviction, however, that I’m happy to revise as I gain knowledge and experience, and more is revealed to me on a personal level.

I don’t yet have children old enough to lose to addiction and ideology, so I can’t claim to fully understand what that is like. I do, however, have experience with losing faith, losing hope, feeling abandoned by God and my fellow church members. I wrote about one such experience beginning here, if you’re interested: http://bycommonconsent.com/2012/05/13/deaths-and-rebirths-part-1-the-descent/

I learned from that experience that others can testify to you about their personal convictions, tied to how they read the scriptures, concerning the nature of God and the shape of the hope they have for the next life, but what what we really desperately yearn for is our own personal thunderbolt from on high, our own experience with the heavens weeping over our plight. We have a duty, I think, if that’s important to us, to reflect and study and pray, and do what we feel we can to understand and make sense of our experiences. But until we perceive some kind of divine communication, we are fully justified in wondering whether God weeps, whether heaven really cares for us and those we care about.

For my own part, in answer to your question directed at me personally: yes, I will weep for you. I do weep for you. Wherever I am in the universe in the eternities, if you are are disconsolate, you will find me mourning for you, and being with you to the extent that you allow. For my part, if there is a place of pure rest and joy where not even sorrow penetrates our being, then I would turn my back on it, if necessary, in order to mourn with you over your suffering. Maybe this is is the essential reason God is in the end worthy of our worship, that he knows of this realm of paradisiacal non-suffering and pure bliss, maybe he even created it, but he couldn’t leave us to suffer and die alone–so he doesn’t fully dwell there, he attends constantly to his human vineyards and the experiences of his children there. And maybe he presents us with that choice as well: “You can go to the that eternal realm of painless ness and loss of sorrow. Or you can join with me and my Son in the work of eternal lives, in being with, in some way, those who suffer and mourn. We couldn’t leave them and we invite you to stay with us so that they can receive the help and love they need.”

I don’t know. All of this is consistent with my understanding of God, but it needn’t, of course, be the case. I only know that as far as I am concerned, and I am confident many others feel this way as well and even that this is what, in the end, constitutes God as divine, I feel inclined to eternally mourn and comfort, and likely to always need the same, on some level. At the end of the talk from Elder Holland I quoted in the post, he reminds us of this from Joseph Smith: “the nearer we get to our heavenly Father, the more we are disposed to look with compassion on perishing souls; we feel that we want to take them upon our shoulders, and cast their sins behind our backs.”

I was very impressed by this exchange. I personally would feel belittled and almost cheated if on judgment day, I was told that my most meaningful sorrows – the ones that had changed my life and understanding – were meaningless. Or worse were a sign of my deficiencies, as if I only had enough faith or a long enough view on things, I wouldn’t be pained by such experiences.

My heart does resonate with a God that knows and loves me so completely, that He would be pained over things that pain me (even if He knows that I am but one in billions and that my pains will someday be replaced with joy). I can also get behind a view where exaltation is dependent on reaching ever greater levels of compassion and charity.

I have the hope that with God’s help I can and am becoming more like this, as one who can endure what needs to be endured in order to extend charity to all.

I understand that being one with all things, without the capacity to change the objectionable things, is not for everyone.

The good news is that:

1) My conception of heaven doesn’t need to have any bearing on anyone else’s conception of heaven.

2) Even if there is a superior form of heaven that God will lead us all into, I trust that He will not force us to assimilate any more than we are ready at a given point in time.

He [Christ] didn’t shrink–until he was on the Cross, until he had borne more than he knew how to bear and cried out in anguished hopelessness that God had abandoned him. It was in that moment, perhaps, more than any other, that he finally, and truly, and terribly, became one with us, one of us….….Jesus did not come to improve God’s view of man nearly so much as He came to improve man’s view of God and to plead with them to love their Heavenly Father as He has always and will always love them. The plan of God, the power of God, the holiness of God, yes, even the anger and the judgment of God they had occasion to understand. But the love of God, the profound depth of His devotion to His children, they still did not fully know—until Christ came.

Perhaps Heavenly Father didn’t need Christ to sacrifice himself in order to forgive us. Perhaps we need some type of key or prop to help us to more fully understand God’s love for us and his capacity to forgive – and Jesus’ death became that key.

Much to ponder, thanks for the link Ray! (also the link appears to be broken as I couldn’t just click on it to get to common consent)