When the phone rings at two in the morning, it is never good news. Nobody calls to offer you a job in the early hours of the morning. Campus safety doesn’t alert me at dawn that the Torrey students are all safe. The phone rings at the wrong time and it churns up fear.
“Are the children home?”
“Are Mom and Dad o.k.?”
“I hope the Torrey students are fine.”
The worries slow me down for at least one more ring, until the chaos settles just a bit.
“Hello.”
And most of the time, thank God, it is some telemarketer who does not know I am Pacific time and he is East Coast. As I settle back into bed, I am not really mad at this annoying caller, because all is well. The kids are asleep, Mom and Dad are starting their day, and the students are doing whatever it is students do at 2:00 AM.
Except once, just once, the call did not end that way. It ended with bad news, very bad news, and the news from Virginia has brought it back to me.
I recollect it. I am there and the phone is ringing.
One of the first class of Torrey students, in her senior year, was in a fatal car accident. They called me and gave me the news . . . and a beloved student and friend was gone. There was nothing I could do to help.
Angie was with God.
It was over . . . and almost nothing is ever over in academic life. You can appeal, do a study, refer it to a committee. Almost always, but not now.
You think stupid things at that moment,
“Not before her graduation!” or “I have an appointment with her to discuss grad school next week.”
I did what I could do, tried to stay out the way, did my best not to burden people suffering more than I.
My pain was, after all, much less than the agony of a loving mother and father. It was less than close friends, but it was still real.
It still is real. Every holiday my church remembers her . . . it is a place many of her friends still attend.
The Torrey program named a graduation honor after Angie . . . and now I almost resent the fact (irrational!) that to students a decade later, it is hard to communicate that she is not just a name or an award. She was a teacher who did outreach in Mongolia and who ate cookies with my kids (when they were so little!) in my dining room.
I miss so many of my Torrey students . . . who have the funny habit of graduating and moving off to live good lives, but I keep waiting for Angie to graduate.
I cannot fathom, I really cannot even imagine, the pain of over thirty such calls in one day.
All over the nation as the tragedy unfolded, parents, relatives, and friends got the phone call they dreaded. We want to say something to let them know we are so sorry . . . that somehow we feel their pain, but we cannot say anything that matters and we cannot know their pain.
Take this as one man’s testimony to Jesus’ power to help with the pain of the unexpected loss of a student. It is not an argument, but an attempt to help by sharing what helped.
It did not help to try to cheer up or move on.
I hate death. Even though I know it is better for Angie, I hate it that she is gone . . . and then I hate my selfish feelings. All the long process of grief is just beginning for some many hundreds of our fellow citizens.
We want someone to blame, something to do, in a vile situation like this one.
One person did a wicked thing to many. It very well may be that there is nothing much else to understand. Nobody has yet devised a foolproof plan against tragedy. Still we hope to find some reason and for that reason to give meaning to the meaningless, emptiness of evil deeds.
Evil never has meaning in itself. It is always a twisted mockery of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Earlier times knew that the bad things that happened to us were, in a very complex way, part of a great cosmic struggle between good and evil. As in every war, it is the innocent who suffer first and the most. Our grandparents understood (most of them) that pain had ultimate meaning and the accounts would be set right in the end. At the conclusion, when the accounts are read, God will make sense of nonsense.
This righting of wrongs does not happen quickly. Where is God in the middle of this tragedy? Philosophers have written on this topic, but I find that people ask at times like this not to hear from philosophers, but because they are hurting.
They want the pain to stop or sense to be made of their pain. Feelings and intellect are so confused that only a special kind of book will do. I have found the two most helpful books to be C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed and Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy. Both are by thoughtful men who knew deep pain and struggled just to survive, let alone to understand. Neither book provides foolish or simple “answers.”
This I do know. I cannot stop my hurting by getting rid of God, the one person who might be able to bring justice to the bad that humans do. He gave each of us free will not for what one wicked young man chose to do with it, but to do good to others. One young man took this good gift and used it to inflict pain. We can only cry out to Him and ask Him for help.
Angie would still be gone if I doubted God, but my lack of faith would undermine any hope of ever seeing resolution and some goodness come through evil.
Generic prayers to a generic god will not do. When hurting, I don’t need the god of the philosophers, but a God who loves me enough to come down and suffer with me. Prayers written to pass muster in a University committee are not the prayers of the broken-hearted.
That is why I pray that Jesus Christ will comfort each soul in pain tonight.
He left heaven to know human pain personally. First, God “got a phone call in the night” that said humanity had fallen. Then came the awful ringing sound, iron on iron, of Good Friday. The bell that sounds on Easter reminds us that there is hope.
God has helped. Pain has been helped. There is, I can report after ten years, hope.
In Virginia, hope must seem far away, but it is there at the end of the long road.
Tonight in my Torrey class we discussed endings and death. We were reminded that no person is promised any particular amount of time and that our preparedness training for that final challenge must be constant. The same things will begin to take place in Virginia.
I pray God that I will never get another phone call in the night, but I know, eventually, I will. More than that I pray for those now in the first stages of greater pain . . . that they will be allowed privacy, time, and healing. Christ have mercy! Christ have mercy! Christ have mercy!
