Why?

Monday’s news reports from the Virginia Tech campus were shocking, to say the least. What had at first appeared to be a murder-suicide developed into a massacre by the end of the day. Thirty-three were dead including the gunman. What happened? Why?

The question of why is becoming a more and more common question for me. Maybe I’m reverting back into a 4 year old, as some suggest. But it could also be that I’m wrestling with something greater than myself and maybe one of the first steps in wrestling with this mysterious something is simply asking why.

The question of why was on my mind Tuesday as I watched streaming video of the convocation at Virginia Tech. As the Governor spoke, he used the examples of the sufferings of Job and Jesus as described in the Bible. President Bush spoke of God and prayer. Representatives from four faith groups - Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity - offered words of consolation to the students, faculty, families and others. All expressed sympathy, concern, caring, reassurance and hope. But no one made any attempt to answer the burning question of why.

Why not? Could it be that there is no acceptable answer to the question of why this happened at Virginia Tech? Even as we’re bombarded in coming days with the logic of experts explaining why tragedies like this happen, there is, in the final analysis, simply no acceptable answer to explain why a young man would be driven to throw his life away and take the lives of many more in the process.

Accepting there is no answer to the question of why, I will add what happened at Virginia Tech to my growing list of evidence that a great Evil exists. It is a powerful Evil that can deceive and devour anyone willing to submit to its dark call. It is so seductive it can lead a lonely, angry young man to commit the horrible act of taking innocent lives and his own.

When I consider the evidence of such powerful Evil, I begin to understand why the story of Jesus is called “good news.”