Reflection / Sean Gallagher

‘Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord’—a reflection on the tragedy in Minneapolis

Aug. 27 started off for me like many days during the school year. I attended morning Mass at 7:20 at Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Church in Indianapolis with students from Lumen Christi Catholic School, located adjacent to the church, and other worshippers.

Included among them were my two youngest sons, Philip, a high school junior, and Colin, a sixth grader.

Colin sat with me at the Mass. (Philip prefers to sit with his high school peers.) My experience was much like many parents and grandparents across the archdiocese who attend school liturgies.

In the middle of the day, I, like many other people around the country, learned of the tragic shooting at Annunciation Church in Minneapolis in which two students were killed and 21 other people were injured during a Mass attended by students from the parish’s school.

The news struck me much like that of other school shootings through the years, going back to the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in 1999. But what happened in Minneapolis, understandably, hit closer to home.

I had just attended a Mass that morning celebrated not long before the liturgy at Annunciation. It was filled with school students (including two of my sons) much like the Mass at Annunciation horrifically marred by the shooting.

What happened in Minneapolis naturally (or supernaturally) returned to my heart and mind as I took time for prayer at points during the rest of the day.

That evening, I prayed Night Prayer from the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours, something that I had done countless times in the past. Praying it that night, though, was different. I felt that I was praying it for and with the parents of the children killed, injured and traumatized in the day’s attack at Annunciation.

Psalm 130, which was included in Night Prayer that day, begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice! O let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading” (Ps 130:1-2).

Those words, as evocative as they are, surely only begin to scratch the surface of what the parents of the Annunciation students may have experienced that day in their relationship with God.

And they may very well, and very understandably, feel alone and separated from God in those dark depths.

In a time they might not yet be able to foresee, they might know the start of some kind of consolation in realizing that others are with them in that abyss—including Christ himself. He went there in his passion and death. We hear his cry from the depths when he said from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46).

Through his sacred humanity, Christ knows all of the full depths of misery into which anyone of us can be thrust. He remains one with us in the worst of our trials, even if we cannot, at least at first, experience this closeness.

Christ is at our side at every moment of our lives, especially when we feel separated from him in our darkest hardships. His love for us reaches out to us through and beyond the deepest depths of pain that we can ever experience in this broken world of ours.

It can do this because his love for us is infinite. No suffering in this world can separate us from his infinite love. We can find assurance of this in Christ’s resurrection. The world threw its worst at Christ in his passion and death. Yet, he overcame it through love. And now Christ yearns to have the power of his infinite love reach out to us when we cry to him from the depths of our own pain.

Later in Psalm 130, we pray, “My soul is longing for the Lord more than the watchman for daybreak. Let the watchman count on daybreak and Israel on the Lord” (Ps 130:6-7).

It may be hard for the parents of Annunciation School’s students in the midst of the darkness into which they were plunged on Aug. 27 to have faith that the Lord will bring them forth to daybreak.

Misguided snubbing of prayer for the dead and suffering by some political leaders and commentators in the wake of the tragedy in Minneapolis notwithstanding, I invite all parents and grandparents of students in Catholic schools across central and southern Indiana to join me in prayer for Annunciation’s students, their parents and their families.

In such prayer, God in his grace joins us together with them. And even if their faith has been challenged or even shattered by what happened on Aug. 27, may our faith lift them up until God in his mercy lets the light of the risen Christ in his eternal daybreak shine upon them.
 

(Sean Gallagher is a reporter for The Criterion.) †