From the Storm into the Silence: Where Tragedy Meets Faith

When I woke up my phone was loaded with alerts. Messages from family and friends had flooded in asking if I was okay. Confused, I pulled up CNN on my phone. On the south end Las Vegas Strip, a gunman had opened fire from a high rise property onto an open air concert, killing dozens and injuring hundreds. That Monday had been set aside as a “self care” day for me but I knew that I would have to go into the hospice where I work as a chaplain, only a few blocks from the tragedy. A text from my boss’s boss confirmed that.

The memories of that day remain a vivid blur. I remember rushing to work and seeing the hole in the window of Mandalay Bay, looking like a jagged black void. Everything was bustle. Meeting with other leaders to co-ordinate a response. Generating a list of co-workers impacted by the tragedy to check on. Sitting in stunned and nervous agitation with the members of my regular grief support group who were trying to negotiate public tragedy while wrestling with their own private struggles. Planning community support and an impromptu prayer/reflection service for our staff with the other chaplains. All the shock and horror spurred action and adrenaline.

After mass shootings or natural disasters, the news gets peppered with stories about acts of compassion and generosity. These usually build momentum and become a narrative about solidarity and resiliency. All this gets boiled down into the impacted community’s name mashed into the hashtag “#strong.” I don’t doubt that these things arise from genuine goodness and compassion among neighbors. But these good intentions possibly meet a psychological need. When evil appears in our midst, the law lights us up with purpose. It becomes a force compels us to muster all the good that we can to push it back. Not only do we “look for the helpers” as Mr. Rogers counseled, but we also rush in to be the helpers too. Tragedy that takes human life strikes us like some sort of ritual pollution. We all want to do our part to erase the stain.

I witnessed the furor I felt in my own work externalized as this amorphous and crowded human surge a few days later. My fellow chaplains had all agreed to take turns rounding in a nearby hospital to relieve the exhausted hospital spiritual staff. The panic that marked the evening when the first victims arriving on Sunday night settled into a mildly controlled chaos by the Wednesday afternoon. A long line nearly out the door terminated at the information desk. Police and security were everywhere. People who had risked their lives dragging complete strangers through the mud, loading them still bleeding into cars to rush to the hospital, clamored at the desk to see the wounded or at least get information on how they were doing. Family relatives of those hospitalized for routine ailments and surgeries unconnected to the event waited nervously to get in.

People huddled together and milled around the lobby. Some quietly and tearfully, others loudly. After a double-take I saw Anderson Cooper standing just twenty feet away from me picking up his Starbucks order. Three young women interrupted my star-struck stare. They wore t-shirts from a local mega-church and brandished a bedazzled cardboard sign that read “Free Hugs.” Pointing to my chaplain badge they begged me to let them onto the floors because they too were “on my side and here to help.”

***

When the head hospital chaplain eventually came and got me, he gave me a short debrief and walked me up to the floors he wanted me to cover and walked off. I felt like I had entered a different world. The first thing I noticed was the quiet.

Hospitals are not usually loud, but they can be noisy places. Machines beep. Muffled PA announcements, pages, and beeps create an intermittent din. Both staff and families walk and sometimes rush through the halls, pushing clanking carts with squeaky wheels. People gather at the nurse’s station to chat and co-ordinate care with an occasional laugh. TVs blare in the rooms of bored patients. Other patients seek help by calling out. Like cars and sirens on a busy street, this is the ambient noise of the fortified city we call the hospital.

The loud sounds I heard this time were the scuffs and clicks of my shoes on the floor. The machines seemed quieter. Staff worked with hushed voices. Families sat in near silence in rooms and few people walked through the halls. On many of the rooms were pieces of masking tape with the letters, “GSW” stuck on the doorframe. I guessed correctly that these letters stood for “gunshot wound.” That tape was an eerie epitaph of the horror of those moments.

The tides of adrenaline that had pushed me for the last 48 hours began to ebb. Gingerly, I would walk into rooms and introduce myself. I’d be met by blank stares when I asked if people needed to talk. I was wading through deep waters of shock. My prayers seemed like an imposition. A few told me their stories but most politely tolerated me. One or two people shouted me out of rooms in rage. Staff recounted to me in detached but gristly clinical detail about the wounds they were treating and their fatigue.

I had emerged from those elevator doors eager to help. Instead, after just half an hour, I felt helpless. There were no heroics. No affirming encounters. No uplifting spiritual moments. No free hugs. Thoughts and prayers seemed meaningless and at times very unwelcome. I walked those hallways aimlessly, trying to find something to do. I tried to fight my growing awareness that what these people had experienced was not something to be fixed by prayers, compassion, mercy, or effort. This was a recovery room for people visited by hell. The blank stares and the silent and teary faces told me that some people were still in the midst of it. The best I could hope to do was to be there, be humble, and shut up. Nothing can help people overcome by tragedy until the people helping are themselves overcome.

The vast space between the frenetic activity of the lobby and the subdued and painful hush of those inner rooms full of the wounded was the real lesson that I took home that day. It was as if the noisy waves of good intentions just crashed like waves on the rocks of an impassive and unforgiving shore. The journey between the storm and the silence was short, but the experience incredibly vast.

***

Whenever new tragedies strike, I still think about the contrast between those spaces in the same hospital. We are so tempted in the midst of our shock and doom-scrolling to join a chorus of voices looking to assign blame and point a finger. Confronted with the vast chasm that evil tears among us, we are tempted to treat it as a problem seeking a solution. Whether it’s legislation or “free hugs” we want to push away the pain we feel by just doing something. And these impulses are not bad. They’re praiseworthy and even necessary. But they can’t erase that silent and crushing stain of tragedy that steals peace and ruins lives. Our best efforts can’t defy the truth that tragedies reveal. Dreadfully, in the most ultimate sense we are all helpless.

Helpless, too, is one with nails in his wrists and arms outstretched on jagged wood. The cross is God’s own journey from the storm of human striving and works into the crushing weight of sin and death that no effort can overcome on its own. Christ takes that cross to be there with us in all the places where we have been cast down, befuddled, shocked, torn, wounded, stricken, and speechless. We might call for him in the places where we are just doing our best to make a difference, or where we are pushing our way to make sure everything turned out okay. But Jesus does not give out free hugs — just one incredibly costly one at the ultimate price.

We might ask where God is in the midst of tragedy. In his own struggle and dejected pleas for help, Jesus is the answer we can’t truly learn but only experience. We seek him in the rush of our helping, but he finds us in the subdued hush of our helplessness. Tragedy is not defeated in his teachings but in his body. By his wounds we are healed. In those wounds he dwells with us in that horrible silence and stays with us until the choking smoke of tragedy clears and we can finally start to hear another word.