NEWTOWN – On the night of December 14, just hours after a mass shooting at the
local elementary school ripped comfort and security away from the wealthy
residents of Newtown, Connecticut, Elizabeth Cleary found herself alone in this
small town’s Catholic church at 1 a.m. The teacher of 26 years clasped her hands
and wept as she sat in her pew.
That evening, she found solace in a
presence that she swears she could physically feel – and very nearly
see.
“When I was here that night, there were these tiny candles,” she
says. “There was no wind at all, and no breeze – but their flames were dancing.
You can tell that their presence lingers for a while. And you can feel it when
they let go.”
Since 2005, Pope Benedict XVI has called on Americans to
resist materialism and reclaim the true meaning of Christmas: the celebration of
the birth of Jesus, brought into the world ultimately to die for man’s
sins.
That message is reverberating throughout Newtown’s churches, town
halls and households this holiday season, challenging residents in their search
for unattainable answers to why 20 of their children and six adults were
brutally slain two weeks ago.
Their efforts to resolve the existence of
evil in their perfectly manicured town through prayer, spirituality and stock
symbolism have highlighted a uniquely American trend – that as the frequency of
such mass killings has increased, reliance on religiously charged vigils has
become predictably commonplace.
Reid Hettich, a pastor for 27 years at
the Mosaic Church of Aurora, Colorado, had the unfortunate task of organizing a
vigil in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting in a local movie theater
that killed 12 people and wounded 59. He noticed that people only nominally
affiliated with a religion turned to faith in his town after its people came
under attack.
“Certainly, I think there’s an immediate spike in faith,
and that goes away to some degree,” Hettich says. “But there’s a greater
awareness that there just aren’t good answers, apart from belief.”
Just
after the shooting in Aurora, he was surprised to hear from local government
officials that they specifically wanted a prayer vigil, and not a
non-denominational, candlelight ceremony – one still representative of America’s
diverse faiths, but fundamentally religious at its core.
“There seems to
be this recurrent trend in American politics that government and the social
order rely on religious agreement,” says David Sehat, author of The Myth of
American Religious Freedom. “And when there are tears in that social order, they
turn to religion proper for the restoration of those fixtures.”
In
Tucson, Arizona, where six people were killed and US Congresswoman Gabrielle
Giffords was severely wounded in a 2011 shooting rampage, religious leaders from
across the spectrum came together to hold a prayer vigil – and found themselves
gathering for yet another vigil this month to honor Newtown’s
fallen.
“The frequency is going up, there’s no doubt about it,” says Dana
Yentzer, pastor at Tucson Church International. “And I do wonder if the vigils
themselves will lose their impact if that continues. But from a pastoral
standpoint, I try to provide hope again, no matter what the
circumstance.”
At root of concerns over the frequency of these vigils is
a confounding theodical question: whether a benevolent, all-powerful, omniscient
God should be listening in on all these calls for the killing to stop. One
widely known expert on the role of religion in America notes that while this
problem rarely bubbles into public debate, any country as wedded to rituals as
the United States is must bear the consequences of defending them – namely
facing tough questions.
“The central question is, if you keep having
rituals like this, don’t you learn eventually that God isn’t stopping what’s
happening? That evoking God is not getting the job done?” says Sarah Barringer
Gordon, a history scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “And it
may be the simple answer is that people just don’t think that’s God’s
job.”
But this shooting feels different – at least to President Barack
Obama, who wept at word of the news out of Newtown. Brushing away tears, he
quoted scripture when ending remarks on the shooting at the White House; he
opened with words from the Bible at a vigil two days later in
Connecticut.
Returning to St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church on
Christmas Eve, Cleary shed tears once more, genuflecting before turning to leave
the Newtown refuge (though shooting rampages have not spared houses of worship;
a Sikh temple in Wisconsin was targeted only five months prior). She leaves
behind a manger empty of the baby Jesus – a potent polysemic image speaking to
an absence of youth, or perhaps adequate faith, in Newtown, a place already
saturated with symbolism.
In the wintered garden of the church,
surrounded by teddy bears and toy angels endowed with all the suffering of their
past owners, she calls herself disenfranchised with her religion, while still a
compulsory participant.
“I don’t think you have to have faith to enjoy
these vigils,” says Marleen Cafarelli, a resident of Newtown for over 30 years.
“It’s about the community coming together to distribute the pain. It’s what we
need right now.”
Community may be the godliness that Newtown seeks to
restore in its ceremony.
Indeed, if there were any one thing, it may just
be community that separates this place – along with Tucson, Aurora, Virginia
Tech, Oak Creek and Columbine – from the many other American neighborhoods that
see similar crimes on a much more frequent basis.
At the firehouse down
the street from Sandy Hook Elementary – where parents stood for hours waiting
for their children, only to pierce the thin December air with echoing wails as
they heard the worst – one fireman, Michael Reyen, looks wearily toward the door
after a trying two weeks.
“Most everybody has gone to the vigils because
it’s just part of the healing process, myself included,” he says. “But at this
point, I just want to spend Christmas at home with my family.”