Each of us, no doubt, will have our individual responses – various combinations of sorrow, anger, frustration, despair – to yet another mass shooting this past Wednesday in which the lives of seventeen persons were killed and many more injured when a former student entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland FL in mid-afternoon with a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle and began randomly shooting.

This act of violence (as the above photo signifies) took place on both Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday – Valentine’s Day in which we quietly remind those dearest to us of our love and care for them and how our lives would be so much less meaningful and even perhaps empty without their presence … and Ash Wednesday in which those in the Christian liturgical tradition begin a forty-day Lenten period of self-examination and reflection symbolized by a cross of ashes being placed on the forehead with the words, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”

Some of you may have noticed that I wear a little red pin on the left lapel of my sports coat or suit coat when I lead services. The symbol on this pin is that of a stylized Greek cross in which the vertical and horizontal arms are of equal length with an imagined human transfixed at the center where the arms meet, the conjoining of a “double pair of opposites.”

Following the lead of Jungian author Robert Johnson, the symbolism of this pin for me – in addition to being a reminder to me of my Christian roots – is of the paradoxical nature of our human life, caught, as we are, between heaven and earth, eternity and time, joy and sorrow. As the ancient author of the Ecclesiastes says: “Oh, what a task humankind has been given.” (a paraphrase of Ecclesiastes 1:13)

This Sunday we will yet again place a stone during our Joys & Sorrows ritual in connection with another mass shooting, thus recognizing the sorrows of the world beyond our sanctuary walls … and Kathy will also be addressing our children in the Fellowship Hall prior to them going to their classes with regard to this horror that is increasingly part of their world.

Bruce Bode