Faith Works 5-12-23

Faith Works 5-12-23
Jeff Gill

Pastoral care intersects with political debate
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Just about any minister will tell you that the hardest pastoral care situations are around the death of a child. Far and away, those events are painful for everyone involved, and the simple answers are often those that create new pain as much as easing loss.

Sometimes, you simply sit with the parents and family, and grieve with them. The time for words will come, but you can't and shouldn't force it. The questions will come, and they will be hard, and call on your faith as much as the grieving mother or father's trust in love at work, even in the midst of death.

When the time comes to talk, you need to be able to say something. You will pray, and think, and even rehearse a bit in your mind what to say, but the dialogue when it comes is going to follow it's own pattern, and the direction of the conversation is going to be guided by their needs. I can't sum it up better than that.

A close second, in my own experience, is a sort of situation where current events have me reliving, and rethinking those confessions and responses I've been through with people torn up in grief.

It has been when someone comes to me after a suicide by firearm, and they provided the weapon in question, usually sold or given to a friend or family member, not long before the act.

This isn't about law. In the cases I've been involved with going back across forty years, I'm fairly certain no legal line was crossed. The pastoral problem is when the survivor, the person who provided unwittingly the tool by which the deed was done, is asking themselves how they could have known, or even how they could not have known. "He seemed fine, we were talking about plans for this summer, I had no idea."

You may well have heard that in the first four months of 2023, one-third of the year thus far, over 13,900 gun deaths have occurred in the United States. That includes thirteen shooting events which took lives in K-12 schools, out of 184 "mass shooting" events which the Gun Violence Archive defines as four or more people shot not including the shooter. There are a fair number of criminal events mixed in with those 184, crooks shooting each other, which is sometimes used as a way to dismiss that figure, but in sum those too have an impact on the wider community.

What I fear is too often overlooked is that 60%, around 7,920 deaths in that grim total, are suicides. Those are the massive iceberg undergirding the tragic and horrible pinnacle which is that so many of the public mass shootings, such as in Texas recently, Tennessee before that, and on and on, are seemingly in the end a means to a particular kind of suicide, but an intention to die by one's own hand or to force another to do the shooting.

I have no simple policy prescription or political response. I do know the Founders with muzzle-loading black powder rifles longer than your arm would be utterly baffled by the idea of 8,000 citizens shooting themselves. It's a further problem in the larger question.

And I pray I do not have to find a way to comfort more people whose anguish is over having provided the weapon not just for a friend to self-harm, but to take many with him on the way. That's grief I have no easy answer for.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; he has many and complicated feelings about firearms. Tell him how we can reduce the number of suicides at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.