This piece was originally published at Patheos on December 11, 2012.
Listen to me read “Mass Shootings”.
This afternoon there was a shooting in the middle of a major shopping mall near where I work. At least two people have been confirmed dead so far. What do such shootings say about our society? Random violence? Random lives? Random meaning? How do we respond?
So often we approach one another simply as mass, where we have no inherent meaning or value. Kind of like the stuff we buy at Christmas—no inherent meaning, only the value we give to it. Of course, people are more than mass, as a collective and as individuals. Next time I am in that mall, I am going to look at each person I pass by not as a mass, and not simply as one of the nameless mass of people shopping, but as those whose lives are by no means random. They count far more than the stuff we buy.