(no subject)

[rivka]

As our ministers prepare to retire, they're re-delivering some of the sermons they consider to be their greatest hits from the past. On Sunday, Phyllis preached a sermon she'd given on the fourth anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre, in which fourteen female engineering students were killed by a gunman who announced that he hated feminists. She talked about the massacre in detail, and the complexity of issues involved: should we think of it as a random act of evil by a deeply sick individual, or as part of a massive epidemic of violence against women?

She brought it home and made it personal, from both sides: she talked about being raped when she was thirteen years old, and she talked at length about the experience of finding out that one of her close friends ("a good liberal Unitarian-Universalist") had beaten both his wife and his daughter. She talked about how hard it was to report him, and how no one in that family - even the victims - will speak to her anymore. She talked about the necessity of taking action even when the problem is overwhelming and you know your actions probably won't be enough.

At the end of the sermon, she placed fourteen white roses in a vase while her husband and co-minister, John, read out the names of the fourteen women killed in Montreal. Then the congregation was invited to come forward and place additional roses in the vase in honor of other survivors or victims of violence against women. We closed with one of my favorite chants from the hymnal:

I know this rose will open
I know my fear will burn away
I know my soul will unfurl its wings
I know this rose will open.

It was one of the most intense services I've ever been to. I cried and cried. But it didn't just feel dismal. It felt like important emotional work.

---

Afterward, I've found myself stuck with one piece of the story that I hadn't known before. The Montreal gunman walked into a classroom and ordered the fifty male students and professor to leave. After they did, he shot the nine women who remained. It horrifies me to think of all of those men filing out of the room, knowing that they were leaving their classmates to be murdered. I can't help but contrast it with the elderly professor at Virginia Tech who blocked the classroom door with his body, sacrificing his life to give his students time to escape out the window. What would have happened if they'd tackled him? Sixty to one makes such different odds than nine to one.

Then I thought about all the times I've read in a news report about female hostages being released while men continued to be held. I've never asked myself whether women in that situation were wrong to leave.

I still don't know the answer. To either scenario.

Comments

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I deliberately crafted my comment to be a calm, neutral response to what seemed to me a bunch of the other commenter's projections.

What about the girls murdered at the Amish school recently? And of course the girls at Platte Canyon high school just a week or two before?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yes. I'd forgotten that in the Amish school the boys were sent out. And Platte Canyon I hadn't heard of at all.