Rest in peace

Please pray for the repose of the soul of my wife's grandmother Mildred. She suffered a massive stroke a week ago and passed away yesterday around 4 pm. She was 98 and lived a very holy and faith filled life.

And I don't say that lightly, or without meaning. She bore 16 children and outlived way too many of them. Catholic until the end, even though she was not responsive when they got her to the hospital, she wouldn't let go of her rosary or holy medal.

The good news in this sadness. My wife was able to return to North Dakota in time to see her and pray with her. Grandma recovered to the point of being aware who was there and able to look at them. She also got to see our 4 month old daughter for the first time, our daughter who bears grandma's middle name Victoria.

So remember Mildred Victoria in your prayers and also my wife's family who have lost a two in the last 8 months or so, a maternal grandfather last fall and now the end of the generation on the paternal side.

Shootings don't make sense

But these bloggers do. Much better than I can anyway.

Kathy at Relapsed Catholic: Obligatory Virginia Tech Post

Please don't indulge in godless modern paganism and set up homely, self-indulgent makeshift memorials with cheap flowers and teddy bears. Don't hold hands and sing bad pop songs.

Go to church. That's what it's for. For centuries, people smarter than you and with more finely honed aesthetics worked on rituals that actually do what they're supposed to do.

Those people who hung around outside the Palace after Princess Diana's death looked like fools and you will too if you cave to the lure of cheap grace and post-modern superficiality. Those British mourners displayed as much gringe-inducing, pan-generational learned helplessness as Katrina survivors, but their laziness and ignorance was spiritual.

Worse, you will still feel as empty as you did before, maybe more so, and wonder why.

Don't make America look stupid and shallow to the whole world by Disneyfying your grief. [emphasis in original]

And Bear-i-tone at The Spirit's Sword: And again

In the days to come our newspapers will undoubtedly be filled with stories related to the events: eyewitness accounts, police reconstructions of the events, calls to ban guns, calls to not ban guns, and, most of all, stories about the killer, whomever he was.

The study of the killer is a natural response to the question: why? Why did he do it? What drove him? How can we stop it from happening again? The news will trot out their long lines of experts, each with their own theory explaining what happened, as the news trolls through his history, looking for some clue, some missing piece, to explain everything.

This tendency is natural, but, it seems to me, misplaced. Publishing his story will lead to others reading it to identify with the killer, and to see themselves in him. This should never be encouraged. It has always disturbed me that after events such as these, and I have seen far too many events like this in the news, I know everything about the killer, and about his victims I have only a number.

We should see the victims as the innocents they were; their hopes and their dreams. They should be seen as people, and not numbers. The would be killers should see the outcome of their actions as a loss of real, individual humans, and not a body count. [emphasis added.]