My prayers are with the NIU community
It seems a lifetime ago that I was accepted by Northern Illinois University as a prospective journalism student. For a while back then, my life was very much oriented toward DeKalb. My girlfriend had graduated from there. I vastly enjoyed my time spent on campus as a prospective student, visited friends who attended there as often as I could, and enjoyed a feeling of belonging at a place circumstances had led me to as a launching pad for the career path which, after years of wondering, I had concluded I was called to follow.
Financial problems intervened (though to be honest, if I'd known then what I know now about student finance they wouldn't have turned out to be real problems at all). And during my internship at a community newspaper, I became uncomfortably aware of the chaotic state of my stomach chemistry as I operated under the inevitable pressures of journalistic deadlines. My mother was killed in an automobile accident; various things happened in my internal spiritual life I doubt I could fully articulate, and I finally wound up returning to Concordia College, River Forest to finish the undergraduate career I'd started there back in the year when- young and foolish- I'd gotten gassed at the Chicago Democratic convention while working for Gene McCarthy. The call to the ministry would be the calling I would heed.
But Northern and DeKalb remained special places. For one thing, located roughly an hour west of Chicago on the route I had to take while taking the last leg of my journey home from either my first parish in St. Louis or my second here in Iowa, it was always a kind of gateway to the entire life I'd lived before I made the decision to take the road I've traveled since. The rest stop there- little more than a McDonald's and a gas station, really- for years was a point at which, especially at times when I'd grown discouraged with the direction life had taken me, I'd pause and think about the path not taken.
Interestingly, in all those years I'd never stopped to actually spend time in DeKalb-and that marvelous row of off-campus bars down the road from the University, each seemingly perfect for a particular mood or moment in a college student's life.
Needless to say, I was shocked this morning when I read that Steve Kazmierczak, a brilliant former NIU sociology student and graduate student at the University of Illinois at Champaign who had already co-authored well-regarded papers on self-injury among convicts and the role of religion in the formation of the American penal system, had pulled out a shotgun and a handgun, walked into an NIU oceanography class, and killed five people before turning one of his weapons on himself.
Virginia Tech was a shock to the nation, and having briefly lived in Virginia I felt more of a connection to the tragedy that occured there than I might have otherwise. But NIU was very nearly my alma mater; in fact, even though I never actually attended a class there, I continue to identify with it in a special way, if only as a connection to a time in my life when I was younger, when options were more prevalent, and the future was more plastic.
Even in communities of enlightenment and learning, the darkness that infests the core of the fallen human soul seems in recent years to have exploded outward more often in more and more requent and destructive ways. But it especially hits home when it happens at a place that played a role in one's own life, however tangential.
My thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of the victims, and with the NIU community in a special way today. May God bring peace and rest to those whose lives have been shattered by yesterday's tragedy in DeKalb.
One final thought, for what it's worth (and I'm not sure how much tht is): NIU, like Virginia Tech, was a "gun free zone."
If an armed campus cop could have stopped Kazmierczak, some of those kids might be alive today.
HT: Drudge, Chicago Tribune
Financial problems intervened (though to be honest, if I'd known then what I know now about student finance they wouldn't have turned out to be real problems at all). And during my internship at a community newspaper, I became uncomfortably aware of the chaotic state of my stomach chemistry as I operated under the inevitable pressures of journalistic deadlines. My mother was killed in an automobile accident; various things happened in my internal spiritual life I doubt I could fully articulate, and I finally wound up returning to Concordia College, River Forest to finish the undergraduate career I'd started there back in the year when- young and foolish- I'd gotten gassed at the Chicago Democratic convention while working for Gene McCarthy. The call to the ministry would be the calling I would heed.
But Northern and DeKalb remained special places. For one thing, located roughly an hour west of Chicago on the route I had to take while taking the last leg of my journey home from either my first parish in St. Louis or my second here in Iowa, it was always a kind of gateway to the entire life I'd lived before I made the decision to take the road I've traveled since. The rest stop there- little more than a McDonald's and a gas station, really- for years was a point at which, especially at times when I'd grown discouraged with the direction life had taken me, I'd pause and think about the path not taken.
Interestingly, in all those years I'd never stopped to actually spend time in DeKalb-and that marvelous row of off-campus bars down the road from the University, each seemingly perfect for a particular mood or moment in a college student's life.
Needless to say, I was shocked this morning when I read that Steve Kazmierczak, a brilliant former NIU sociology student and graduate student at the University of Illinois at Champaign who had already co-authored well-regarded papers on self-injury among convicts and the role of religion in the formation of the American penal system, had pulled out a shotgun and a handgun, walked into an NIU oceanography class, and killed five people before turning one of his weapons on himself.
Virginia Tech was a shock to the nation, and having briefly lived in Virginia I felt more of a connection to the tragedy that occured there than I might have otherwise. But NIU was very nearly my alma mater; in fact, even though I never actually attended a class there, I continue to identify with it in a special way, if only as a connection to a time in my life when I was younger, when options were more prevalent, and the future was more plastic.
Even in communities of enlightenment and learning, the darkness that infests the core of the fallen human soul seems in recent years to have exploded outward more often in more and more requent and destructive ways. But it especially hits home when it happens at a place that played a role in one's own life, however tangential.
My thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of the victims, and with the NIU community in a special way today. May God bring peace and rest to those whose lives have been shattered by yesterday's tragedy in DeKalb.
One final thought, for what it's worth (and I'm not sure how much tht is): NIU, like Virginia Tech, was a "gun free zone."
If an armed campus cop could have stopped Kazmierczak, some of those kids might be alive today.
HT: Drudge, Chicago Tribune
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