This morning at 9:30, I had the television set on and observed with probably millions of other Americans the ringing of the bells for those 20 children who were slaughtered in the school in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. And then I listened to Ancient Faith Radio, to the reflections on this horrible, horrible event there. I listened to Fr. Lawrence Farley’s reflections and comments, teaching; and also Fr. Andrew Damick who also reflected and taught us and preached to us in—I wanted to say in the light of this horrible story; perhaps it would be more accurate to say in the darkness of this horrible story.

And I would strongly recommend to all the listeners of Ancient Faith Radio that they listen to what Fr. Lawrence and Fr. Andrew had to say to us, to listen to their putting this horrible event in the light of Christ himself, who is the light of the world. We’re going to start celebrating the coming of Christ to the world as the Sun of Righteousness, the S-u-n, as the light that shines in the darkness, that enlightens every person, that this light was coming into the world. So in the light of Christ, in the light of the Gospel of God in Christ, Fr. Lawrence and Fr. Andrew really bless us with their words, and I would really urge that you listen to them.

I just want to add a comment or two of my own and a reflection of my own. You might almost even say, a personal or subjective reaction to this terrible tragedy. I can only agree with everything that Fr. Lawrence and Fr. Andrew say, and I was touched by Fr. Lawrence’s reference at the end to the C.S. Lewis story, and Fr. Andrew’s reference to The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. After reading a piece in The New York Times that referred to Dostoevsky’s classic book, which had to do with the innocent suffering of children and how they are abused and raped and murdered in this world, and how one can possibly believe in God when one sees what is going on, as the character Ivan Karamazov says after discussing with his brother, Alyosha, who is the believer, he says, “Maybe God does exist,” as Fr. Andrew noted, “but I reject his world. Why would he make a world this way?”

And even if, theologically, we could argue it was this way or no way—I mean, I argue that all the time—that if there’s going to be a world with human beings in it, with angels, then there will be a world with demons and there will be a world of evil, murderous people. Evil will reign, and the prince of this world will be the devil, the fallen wisdom of this world, because of humanity’s rebellion against God from the very beginning.

So God decided that there had to be a world with holocausts, with tsunamis, with murders of children, with all these horrible, horrible things, and when we hear them all, what comes to the mind of a believer is, first of all, thanks be to God that this is not the final word, as Fr. Lawrence and Fr. Andrew say. That God himself sends his only Son into the world, divine Son, existing from all eternity, who is also God’s word and God’s image and God’s wisdom and God’s way and God’s truth and God’s light and God’s power—that he comes into the world to die, to be crucified. And the death of Jesus, God’s own Son who was life itself, he did not have to die; he did it voluntarily. We know that from the Scripture. He says, “No one takes my life from me. I lay it down; I raise it up again. The Father raises me up; he vindicates me.” And then the Lord Jesus also, saying in the Gethsemane garden, “Put those swords away. This is over. I must endure my Passion.” And he said, “Don’t you think I could call legions of angels and wipe out all evil-doers and the whole Roman empire and so on?” Sure he could.

So our faith, of course, is in the crucified Christ who shares the absolute foolish, nonsensical, irrational, mad, and crazy evil that human beings with the fallen angels have brought into creation, and we all have to endure that; we have to go through that in order to really be deified and to really have everlasting life, and the life which is life indeed, as it says in the letter to Timothy in the New Testament: the life that Christ is, the life of the everlasting kingdom of God which is to come.

But people still ask, “Could God not have prevented this if he so desired?” And the answer is: Of course he could. I mean, when we think of the September 11 in 2001, those men driving those airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the plane crashing in the fields of Pennsylvania, we could say: Yeah, God could have struck those guys dead. For some reason he permitted and allowed those things to happen. And those to whom it did happen, they are martyrs; they are saints in some way, confessors, innocent people, especially those innocent children, and then those adults who protect those children. How those wonderful women at that school gave their life trying to save the children, and they succeeded in some way; more children would have been killed if it weren’t for them.

So when we hear all this, we know that God allowed it; God permitted it. If we were really of the Hebraic mind, the biblical, especially Old Testamental mind rather than the Latin-Greek mind, we wouldn’t say, “God permitted it; God allowed it”; we would say, “God willed it.” In the providential will of God that involves evil, where God has to deal with evil. God willed from all eternity not only that his Son would have to be incarnate in order to be crucified, but he willed also that others would die with him, and there would be many, many innocent victims on the planet earth, not only those who are victims of human violence like these children, or like any person who dies at the hand of another, or like the great gulags in Russia, Soviet Union—70 million corpses in 70 years, as Solzhenitsyn said… How many Jews perished in the Holocaust? Six million. How many people were killed in the Rwanda genocide? At least 800,000. But each one died individually. Each one had his or her own unique and precious life. That one soul is more precious in God’s eyes than the whole of creation. So any time, as Fr. Andrew said, somebody dies at 93 in a hospital, it’s as tragic and as unacceptable as someone being murdered, especially innocent children and heroic adults, being murdered by insane and crazy people.

So when we think about these things, and we have to say—if we’re believers, we have to say that God has his reason in this, because he did allow it to happen. He did permit it. In some sense even, according to his providential will which involves human evil, he even willed. God willed, in some sense, that this would happen at this time of year, in the United States in America, in that particular way, for reasons known to himself. And we know that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, God’s ways are not our ways, but we have to try to discover those thoughts; we have to try to find that way. We have to try to hear what God is telling us, what God is showing us in these crazy things.

And then we must think not only of the victims and the heroes, who are also victimized, the children who died and those who died trying to protect them, but we have to think of Adam Lanza; we have to think of his mother and his father; his mother, Nancy, who had those guns in her house and who knew that her son was terrifically troubled and was planning to take him to counseling, of course. People go to the psychiatrist and the counselor, not to the minister or the priest and the Church any more. That’s the American way now for so many people, perhaps even getting close to the majority in America; I don’t know how many, but certainly they are people who live that way.

And this poor Adam. What an upbringing he must have had; what a household he must have had! Do we know that his father, who’s a very wealthy businessman of some sort, pays alimony to—was paying alimony to Adam’s mother, Nancy, of almost $300,000 a year: $280,000 a year she was receiving from her estranged husband to take care of her two boys. And Adam was already 20 years old and showed every single sign of being deranged and ill and wounded and crazy. I mean, this was seen even by his mother who—I don’t know why she didn’t act, but in any case she didn’t, and she was his first victim.

And how sad it is that there were no bells for Adam and Nancy. Perhaps there should have been. Perhaps there should have been, because their deaths are perhaps even, we might dare to say, more tragic than the deaths of those children and their parents, because they were the perpetrators. There is no human evil that cannot be traced to human guilt. It’s never from God; it’s always by a rebellion against God, an apostasy against God. That’s where all this evil comes from, as Fr. Lawrence and Fr. Andrew so eloquently tell us in their podcasts on Ancient Faith Radio. Please listen to them.

But I would like to add just one more thought. It’s there, with Fr. Lawrence and Fr. Andrew, but I would like to kind of highlight it and bring it out much more explicitly. And this has to do with our reaction, our reaction to events of this nature, including even the murder of Chris Stevens and the other three Americans in Benghazi, even the death of Osama bin Laden, whom our American heroes went in and murdered, and before murdering Osama, they killed his 16-year-old son, who was coming down the stairs when they crashed into that building in order to kill Osama. That 16-year-old boy, what did he do? His only guilt in life—and it wasn’t even a guilt; it was totally involuntary—is that he would be the son of Osama bin Laden, and therefore he would be shot down by American SEALs on the steps of the house where his father was hiding before he was simply shot down. You wonder why we didn’t try to capture him and try to go further with it than simply to slaughter him and then to boast about it all the time, including in our political speeches and how we’re fighting al-Qaeda and all this kind of stuff.

This is all of this world; this is not according to God and to Christ, not according to the God that is revealed in Jesus Christ. It is not. It is not at all, as Fr. Andrew tells us in his wonderful words.

But I would like to add—Fr. Lawrence spoke about C.S. Lewis’ story and Fr. Andrew about Dostoevsky’s story. I would like to tell two stories, just two stories of my own life and of my own experience, because for you and for me personally… And of course we could speak about America as a nation, and we could speak about gun laws and we can speak about psychiatry and we can speak about mental health and we can speak about, I don’t know, alarm systems and getting checked down when we get on airplanes or whatever, as a way of saving lives. Sure, we can do that, but there’s a deeper, more radical question, and that question has to do with how we live, how we live every day, day to day; how I live, how you live, how Americans live, how they spend their time, use their resources, their energies; how do they behave to one another; how do they appear to one another; and what’s happening in America itself.

Adam Lanza was 20 years old. He was a young teenager when his parents divorced. Adam Lanza lived in a genealogical tradition, so to speak: he was the son of Nancy, the son of his father, who were the sons and daughters of somebody, all the way back, you know, theologically, to Adam and Eve. He was a product. He was a product of human behavior, human living, and he had to deal with that. You know, Fr. Alexander Schmemann used to say the whole of a person’s life in this world is: How do you deal with what you’ve been dealt? So we can all ask our self: What have we been dealt? But we can also—perhaps even more important—we adults can ask our self: And what do we deal to other people, beginning with the members of our own families and our own children?

So inspiring is to hear some of those parents of those murdered children speak in what faith they have in God and what love they had for their kids, and how they vowed to change their behavior and to improve and to do better as parents because of this tragic event that the Lord God Almighty for some reason allowed to happen—because he could have stopped it. He could have made Adam Lanza drop dead on the way to the school or before killing his own mother. I mean, God could do this; he didn’t do it. It’s a huge question: Why didn’t he do it? And certainly one of the answers is: For the sake of all of us human beings and for the sake of all of our salvation, that event is now part of our consciousness. It’s something that we see and that we know about and that we must judge our self, individually and as families and as churches and as nations—we must judge our self strictly on how we behave and how we contribute to all of this, because we do.

Dostoevsky in Fr. Andrew’s story, in that same book he said something that we have to hear. He said all human beings are guilty for one another. We are guilty in front of everyone else. We’re guilty because of how we behave and how we act and how we use our life. And the question is: Do we contribute to the madness, the irrationality, the evil, the greed, the violence, the sexual license, and all that money that goes into TV programs—I mean, you can’t look at TV now. You can’t even look at the women giving the news and giving the weather, certainly not if you’re a fallen male the way I am, even though I’m 73 years old. Man, they’re dressed like women used to dress on the street! And then they shout and scream at each other on TV, our leaders in the nation.

And then we have all those films and TV programs that are made: violence and destruction and shooting and killing and all those, and then all the sex stuff. Every single comedy show on TV is about sex, every single one of them, without exception. Somebody’s making those things, selling those things, so that other people would watch those things, like Adam Lanza, and be formed by them, in their mind and in their heart and in their emotions and in their passions, and then evaluate and judge their own life in the light of them, especially when they see how people on the TV can be rich and have money and have cars and have sex and have all those kind of so-called “good things of life,” and they are deprived of them for one reason or another. And then that makes them angry and crazy and mad and desperate and depressed.

What is depression if not stuffed anger? And where does anger come from if it’s not from the anger of not receiving and getting what we ought to from one another, including our own parents and including our own politicians and countrymen? Oh yeah, there’s a big cause for anger here, and when we think of Adam Lanza and when we think also of our reaction to that, what came to my mind was when there was a young woman who tried to kill President Gerald Ford. I don’t know, the older folks will remember President Gerald Ford. He became the president of the United States, and he, being the Speaker of the House, inherited that position. And then Gerald Ford, some young woman tried to kill him. She shot at him and so on.

And there was an article in The New York Times by a psychiatrist named Maslow, I believe, that really struck me. He said when you have an event like this, when you have an event like someone trying to shoot the president or somebody killing Martin Luther King, Jr., or killing John Kennedy, or killing Robert Kennedy, or killing the children in Columbine, or blasting that building in Oklahoma City, or whatever it is—when you have all that happening in this world, this psychiatrist said, you know, those are not exceptional cases. You can’t say, “Well, most of the people are good and most of the people are sane and most of the people act right, but then there are these kooky people who are crazy for whatever reason, and we can check their DNA and check their brain chemistry and all that kind of stuff to find out scientifically to find out why they do the crazy things they do,” as if that could be explained that way, although certainly we inherit the brain chemistry and the madnesses of our parents, even in our bodies, as part of the primordial sin of the world.

We’re born in sinful conditions. We’re not Adam and Eve in paradise, and Adam Lanza was anything but the old Adam in paradise and the New Adam, Jesus Christ; he was the quintessential icon of the fallen Adam, or might we even say more accurately, the product of a whole lot of fallen Adams and fallen Eves in this world, who were brought up in total madness and then end up inflicting that madness on others. But we’re all involved in it, we’re all in this together, and we’re all somehow guilty for it. We’re at fault for it because of any little sin that we commit, because, as Dostoevsky said, the smallest, most seemingly insignificant evil thought in the most secret, hidden recesses of a human heart pollutes the entire universe, because we’re all members of one another, so we are all involved in all of this.

So we have to ask our self the question: What do I do as a person, since I know what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School? And since I know Adam Lanza and his mom, Nancy, and his estranged father who gives his divorced mother $280,000 a year to live by so she could by assault weapons and keep him in the house, and this boy could endlessly watch violent videos when he’s locked up in his room and he won’t even let his mother in? I mean, that’s just madness. But we’re all involved in that, one way or another, and we have to accept that, because what we do every day—every thought that we have, every word that we speak, every act that we take, every thing that we do—it contributes to the total life of all of humanity on the planet earth. It really does.

And we are either part of the evil or we’re part of the solution, and we flip back and forth, as we know: sometimes we’re part of the evil; other times, perhaps, by God’s grace, we are, at least a little bit, a part of the solution—but we’re all in this together.

Now, my two stories. One story is this—these are true stories. I was at a retreat once, and I can’t even remember what the topic of the retreat was, but the priest spoke, and people were there listening and so on, and then when it came to the discussion part of the day and the question-and-answer part, a woman stood up and said to the priest who was speaking, “Father, did you hear about what happened the other day in Scotland, when some man took a firearm and went to a school and shot eight children dead?” This took place in Scotland. It was very similar to Columbine or to Virginia Tech or to Newtown and Sandy Hook School, but just this guy went with a gun and killed these eight children.

So this woman, she appeared to be a very dignified type woman, nicely dressed, obviously a wealthy person, not a poor person, you could just see by her manner and her clothing and so on—then she says to the priest, “Did you hear about that?” And the priest said, “Yeah, I did. I heard about it.” And she said, “Well, what do you have to say about it, Father!?” You know: “What kind of a God do we have that would allow these people to do these kind of things? I can’t just understand it: Why, if we say God is love and all these kind of things that you priests preach and everything, that these kind of things could happen in our world?”

So, hearing that, the priest tried to answer, and he said to the woman, “Well, I think as we hear in church all the time and when we read the holy Scriptures, especially the gospels and St. Paul and our whole faith and the saints who lived who are always persecuted themselves and very often killed, that the evil doesn’t come from God. The evil comes from creatures. It comes from human beings who, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, are exposed to the madness and the insanity and the evil of the demons, the fallen angels. And we’re in this kind of world where evil really triumphs, but God had no choice: if he was going to have a world with creatures capable of knowing God and living forever and having everlasting life, then the human beings had to go through this trial, had to go through this temptation, through many afflictions, to enter into the everlasting life, because they are free. We’re not machines; we’re not robots.”

And then he went on, and he said, “And we can even believe that these eight children in Scotland and these 20 children and the six adults there in Newtown, Connecticut, that their being killed and so on, it’s part of the horrible providence of God like so many who are killed and who die, but hopefully that becomes a testimony; it becomes a witness, where every single person who knows about it has to ask themselves how are they living, what they’re doing, and so on.” So he tried to answer.

Then he spoke about God becoming man and taking on the sin of the world and being struck down in the height of his humanity in the worst possible death a Jew could die, 33 years old, neither senile yet nor any longer juvenile, and unmarried and with no children, and being put down by enemies, Gentiles, sinners. It doesn’t get worse than with Jesus Christ; it just doesn’t get worse. And he, being God, can absorb into himself all of the wickedness and evil and the destruction that has taken place from the murder of when Cain kills Abel outside paradise, children of Adam, and all the madness of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Babylonian temple and all that we’ve gone through.

This is horrible, horrible—but the end is a happy ending. It is something that will save us, that we’ll have to go through. It can purify us; it can make us wise. But, sadly, we have to learn from all of these horrible, horrible things, and those who teach us this lesson are holy people, especially when they’re innocent and they endure these things for the sake of our salvation.

So then the lady answers the priest and says, “You mean that… You’re telling me that these eight children in Scotland were shot down so that… for our salvation? How can that be? What kind of a God is that?”

And the priest said, “Well, yeah, in a sense, that is what I’m saying.” And then the woman spoke back in kind of outrageous and perhaps even self-righteous way in some sense, that she knows better and that this is unacceptable, even though she goes to church and paints icons or something. But in any case, she didn’t get in easily to the priest’s explanation, and as our Fr. Lawrence and Fr. Andrew said, explanations never work in and of themselves. There has to be some kind of spiritual reaction to things in our heart, not just in our brain.

But anyway, it was obvious that the priest was getting irritated at this woman, and she was in some sense almost enjoying herself by being this kind of a gadfly on the priest. So then the priest said to her, “Let me ask you something.” And she said, “Okay.” And he said to her, “You know about these eight children that were killed, don’t you?” She says, “Of course I know. I brought it up to you. I read it in the newspaper or wherever, saw it on TV.” He said, “So you know. You know that that happened.” She said, “Yes.” And then he said to her, “What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?”

And she said, “What do you mean? What can I do about it? I don’t know what I can do about it.” And then the priest said to her, “I won’t ask you to tell us now, but I would ask you to ask yourself: How do I live? How do I live my life in this world? How do I do it? Especially how do I do it when such things can happen?” And the woman looked at him a little bit puzzled, thinking, “Well, what could I do? I’m in America, not in Scotland or wherever?” I could say: I’m in western Pennsylvania; I’m not in Connecticut. My son, the priest, Fr. John Hopko, he’s a priest right nearby Newtown, Connecticut. Yes, he is, and he knows people who know people and who know and are aware all of this, livingly, in their own life.

But the priest said to the woman again, “You know about this. Let me ask you: How do you use your time every day? How do you use your money, since you seem not to be poor? What kind of a house do you live in?” And the priest didn’t know that that very woman and her husband were going to sell their rather large house after their kids left home—and buy an even bigger house! for themselves all alone. He didn’t know that. But he said, “What kind of a house do you live in? How do you use your resources? How do you use the authority and the power that you yourself have? How did you raise your own children? What are they doing now?” And perhaps the priest knew that that woman’s children, who were raised in the Church, were as a matter of fact nowhere to be found, at least not around a church.

Now, maybe it was a little bit mean what the priest did, and he did it delicately, I have to say, and it didn’t appear judgmental, but he wanted to make a point, and he said, “Because, if we know that these things happen in our world, we are responsible for them in our own life. And perhaps the way we’ve been living even can contribute to the things like this that can happen. When we are not using our time, our power, our strength, our resources, our money, our talents, our gifts, our freedoms for the sake of healing, for the sake of saving, for the sake of illumining and enlightening and curing, and not for the sake of adding to the darkness.”

So when we hear about Sandy Hook Elementary School, every single one of us, every human being, and certainly the Christians would say every human being beginning with Christians, if we call ourselves Christians we have to ask our self: How am I judged by the massacre in Connecticut? How does it judge my life? What will I personally, as an individual, as a Christian, as a believer, as a spouse, a husband, as a father, as a great-grandfather—I have a great-granddaughter at my age—still, it’s a judgment on me. It is a judgment on me. It’s a judgment on you. When we hear about this and read about it in our papers or computers, if we look at it on our TVs, that question is constantly being addressed to us: How much do I contribute to this by my own greed, my own violence, my own sin, my own evil, my own neglect, and my own misuse and abuse of all the powers and glories and resources that God has given me? How do I contribute to it?

And what am I going to do about it? Am I going to repent? Am I going to try to change my mind, my behavior, my words—because these things happen and I am involved in them? And I live in a country where these things can happen? Yeah, then I have to be involved in gun control and mental health issues, of course! but much more deeply, in spiritual issues, theological issues, moral issues, beginning with my own self, because the Lord came to save sinners, as St. Paul said, of whom I am the first.

And unless I’m judged as the first of sinners, then all those people died in vain, and all the martyrs died in vain, and all the innocent children, including those who were killed when Moses was born and those who were killed when Jesus was born. I have to answer for all of that, and I have to repent because of it. If I know that that happens, what is my place in it? Both by what I have done, what I am doing today, and what I’ll do tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day until I die myself somewhere somehow in some way.

My second story is this. I was a priest in a parish where a young 17-, 18-year-old girl was killed in an automobile accident going to a baseball game with her boyfriend. I might have—I told this story before on Ancient [Faith] Radio, I believe, but it’s pertinent right now to say it again. And she got killed. She was just finished high school, she was going to enter nursing school, and she got killed. And I had left the parish to my new assignment at the seminary in New York State, but the priest who was just new there—this happened in August and he had just come there in June—he didn’t know her at all, obviously, didn’t know the family. He was just new, so he called me and said, “Fr. Tom, this terrible thing happened.” And I said, “Oh, I will come to the funeral.” He said, “Could you please come, because you know these people. You were their priest for five years.” I said, “Sure, I’ll be there.”

So I was at the funeral and I preached the sermon, and I began the sermon by saying, “Everything that happens is the will of God, but God has a double will. God’s primary will, his primordial will, his divine will is there would be no suffering, no death, no evil, no shooting, no violence, no sexual madness, no greed, no holocaust, no crazy American TV programs and political screaming at each other—God doesn’t want that. But he knew to have human beings at all, he would have to endure that, and he would have to become human himself, and he would have to die so that everyone who wants to be, could be saved.”

So we believe in God who does not want this. This is not God’s will—but, providentially, it is God’s will, because God has to deal with an evil world, with cars and accidents and tractor-trailer trucks and drunk drivers and God-knows-what—angry [road-rage] people or whatever. Yeah, this is the world that we have from God, and we have to live in it according to Christ crucified, and we have to bring hope and comfort to people on the basis of God’s mercy and judgment, not on the basis of gun laws and psychiatric and scientific studies of brain cells or whatever.

So this is God’s will, and so I said to the people, let’s make a vow over the dead body of this woman, this young woman—Denise, her name was?—and ask God: Why did this have to happen? What are we to learn from this? How should our life change because of this? Show it to us! Tell us! You are our God. We want to know. We don’t want her death to be in vain, and we don’t want the death of anyone to be in vain. We don’t want the death of those 20 children and those six heroes to be in vain. We don’t even want the [death] of Adam Lanza and his mother to be in vain! We don’t want any death to be in vain. We want to learn from it, to know from it, to deepen our self, to grow in wisdom and light because of it, to grow in understanding of what it’s really all about, beginning with God Almighty himself.

So I said let’s make a vow over her dead body, that we will not let God go until God shows us and every one of us individually, beginning with me, what it is that I am supposed to learn by this crazy, foolish, nonsensical, irrational death of this beautiful teenage girl. And every time we confront death and tragedies, from Columbine to the Holocaust to the gulags, to the abortion centers where we’re killing little babies before they even have a chance to be born, in our country, and seem to live with that pretty easily, God forgive us. We come for when the child is born, yeah, we come out, but what about those who are living in their mother’s womb? That’s another story, too, isn’t it, that we have to know about and answer for.

So I said let’s vow over her dead body, believing that she is with God and Christ is risen from the dead and we will meet again in paradise; let us ask what we should do about it now while we’re still in this world. Now, some of the pious people, especially the old ladies in my church there, they said to me after, “Father, you shouldn’t say that! God exists. He just knows. Who are we to tell God?” They had that piety: you just silently bear everything and trust in God, which is very admirable, but still it may not be enough for some of us—we want to know! We want to know primarily so that we know what we ought to do. So we have to ask: Why did God permit or even will this to happen?

Well, 14 years later I was at St. Tikhon’s Monastery and Seminary in Pennsylvania. It was Memorial Day, and people were coming to the graves there to pray for their departed. And there’s a huge number of people used to come in the older days to that particular gathering. But anyway, I was sitting on the hill with my little kids and my wife, and we were there. The family of this girl who got killed came walking up the hill through the field. We were sitting out in the field in the grass. And I saw them coming, and they noticed us, and then they came right toward us.

I got up of course and greeted them, they asked my blessing, “How are you Fr. Tom? Hi, Matushka Anne. Look at your children, how big they’ve got!” Of course, it was 14… We had three kids then; they were babies! Now they’re early teens themselves, and in fact one of these, this couple’s daughters is married to a priest, actually, and grew up and got married to a priest. She used to tell my wife, “I want to be a matushka like you!” and she did, and nice.

But in any case, the husband, the father of this family, he looked at me right in the eye and he said to me, “Well, I guess, Fr. Tom, we know why now that had to happen, don’t we?” And he referred to my sermon: Let’s not let God go until we know what we have to do about this, what I have to do about this, what God is asking us because this horror has happened. So this man, he said to me, “I guess we know why this had to happen, don’t we?” And he was referring to himself, because when that daughter was killed, he was not a member of our church, or any church. He was raised a Protestant of some sort. His wife was actually the daughter of a priest; the girl who died was the granddaughter of a priest, actually, Orthodox priest; and they always came to church.

And I would try to ask this man, “Why don’t you come to church some time? Why don’t you come with your wife and your kids? Why don’t you just see how it is?” And he said—he was a vice president of a bank, actually—“I don’t need all that. I don’t need to go there where you wave cloths around and think that God shows up.” When I would bless their house with holy water, he would tell me, “Father, I just painted the walls and those curtains were expensive. Please, why do you got to splash that water around? Can’t you just pray, you know?” He was like a pretty forthright, atheistic type person. He said, “I have better things to do on Sunday morning than to go to watch you dress up and make smoke and whatever, wave cloths.” I asked him once what was better to do, and he said, “Well, to umpire little league baseball games,” that then were beginning to take place on Sunday mornings right during church time.

But anyway, to make this very short, he said, “We know now why she had to die, don’t we?” And what he meant was he believed that his daughter died so that he could be saved. He believed that that tragedy had to happen so that he could repent and change his way of living and become a believer in God and believe in Christ crucified and raised and glorified and resurrected for the life of the world; so he could fight the devil, whether they are domesticated, nice, polite, cosmetic devils like were obviously in his life, or whether they’re violent devils like in the life of Adam Lanza and his family.

But he believed that his daughter had to die so he could be saved. And he entered the Church. I don’t know if he was baptized; maybe he had to be, I don’t know, but he entered the Church. He certainly was chrismated and received into communion. He became a Church member with his family. He’s still alive. He’s quite an old man, older than I am. He’s in his 80s for sure by now, mid-80s. But he actually said, “If that had not happened, I might have still been in the hands of the devil, and I might have still been an absolute fool.”

So the question is: How do we relate to these tragedies, especially the innocents? What has to change in my personal life, your personal life, your family’s life, your church’s life, your country’s life, your political party’s life, your—I don’t know what—artistic community’s life—what has to change? God is trying us to see things in the depth of their horror and to be part of life and not part of death, to overcome what Fr. Lawrence spoke about, the culture of death. Yes, it’s a culture of death beginning with the abortion clinics.

Death is everywhere. Drone missiles, as Fr. Andrew said. What do I do about all that? What can I do? That’s what I have to ask myself when I’m standing there in silence, looking at the TV set, a week after a horror event is taking place, and they’re ringing a bell for each of the persons and flashing their beautiful faces on the television screen. I see that. I know that. What am I doing about it? What are you doing about it? What are we doing about it, every single second of our life on this earth?