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| A candlelight vigil was held for Emilio Hoffman on Tuesday following the shooting at Reynolds High School in Oregon |
For Emilio Hoffman, Jared Michael Padgett, and All the Children Everywhere
This past week on Tuesday, June 9th, 2014, the unthinkable happened. Again. The shooting which occurred in the neighboring district to where my three sons attended school made national news - it happened in a school, it happened in a middle class neighborhood, there was a 14 year old who was killed. Everywhere there have been stories and emotions and vigils and remembrances of Emilio Hoffman and the utter beyond words tragedy of his death. The Reynolds graduation ceremony two nights later honored the 14 year old freshman "who will never again walk the halls of Reynolds High School." Friday I personally joined others to sign a card for the Hoffman family. There was recognition and honoring of the bravery and courage of the high school teacher who was wounded and all those who acted quickly to prevent even greater tragedy and death. Prayers and compassion and heartfelt caring has been expressed again and again for those children and parents who have been so traumatized and experienced so much loss in the aftermath of this latest school shooting.
Remarkable to me is the stunning silence regarding the other victim, 15 year old freshman Jared Michael Padgett, who will also never again walk the halls of Reynolds High School. It can be difficult to see, remember, understand, and hold in compassionate awareness how a perpetrator of violence is first also a victim of violence themselves. It is often easier to not go there, to not look at the larger picture which illuminates the truth of the scope of loss and provides us with greater consciousness of its roots. Yet, the opportunity is at hand, and especially because the other death was also that of a child, to allow ourselves to go deeper. This is the invitation - to go deeper, to shine light on dark places, to open to the profound teachings and gifts which can be found buried in pain, suffering, tragedy and loss.
This takes courage. And wanting to know, wanting to look, wanting to invite in the pain, the horror, the deep wounding that is part of all violent tragedies. Without this openness to learn, to truly embrace the lessons that are begging to be learned, the tragedies will just continue on and on and on. Crazy how war zones have existed in America since our beginning. Some are already aware that children killing children is a daily occurrence in our culture, especially in our larger cities. However, it takes the obvious movement of unthinkable violence into middle class schools to get the attention of many. Of course, the challenge is to hold our eyes and hearts open rather than shrink back into forgetfulness that things for our children are coming apart at the seams. Not just those other children out there in inner city LA or some third world country. It is increasingly children everywhere who are - to one degree or another - wearing the faces and acting out the symptoms that something is horribly wrong in America and in so many other places on Earth.
People who commit monstrous acts don't just fall from the sky. Yes, we absolutely must take gun control seriously and enact new laws. We must. We also absolutely must grow those services and resources which help and support and nourish children and families and communities - mental health resources, healthcare, addiction treatment centers. We need to transform our schools and churches and justice systems and families and cultural stories. Rather than the military, prisons, CEO's, the fossil fuel industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and on and on, we need to fund that which promotes healing, wholeness, awakening, and a more just and caring nation and world.
We need to look into our own hearts and come to experience and understand the pain in ourselves, our families, our communities, our work places, our culture and nation and planet. We need to stop destroying our Earth Mother and we need to stop lying and pretending that things such a global warming, empire building, profits over people, etc., etc. don't exist. Because they do and our children feel the truth. Or they just feel crazy. It is the craziness that comes when we say one thing and then teach our children something differently through our actions, or lack of them.
For me, it has been such an ongoing process to increasingly recognize all that injures, crushes, and cripples our hearts and the hearts of our children. We humans are all given experiences which propel us further into awakening, or more deeply into building our protective walls which work to keep us "comfortably numb." Or at least, that is the illusion.
Everything that shocks us into awareness, I believe, tells us that this isn't just something that happens to "those families out there" or to someone else's children. To live in this culture, in American culture, is to be wounded. Because we are a society drowning in denial. Of all other developed nations on Earth, we are the only one still debating global warming, the death penalty, healthcare, whether or not we need to care for our children, our elderly, our minorities, our mentally ill, our disabled, our veterans, our people. America is truly exceptional, but often not in the ways we like to believe. And our children feel that, they feel that something is wrong. It is crazy-making, especially to young tender spirits, to say one thing when reality is something else all together.
Violence comes in so many forms. A significant part of my 30 years of healing and awakening has involved learning to recognize, lower my tolerance for, set boundaries around, heal and transform violence. Anything which crushes a heart is a form of violence. Over the course of my gradual awakening, I have come to see that much of what passes as normal in America is wounding to our hearts, minds, bodies, spirits, and souls. Certainly all forms of addiction serve to cut us off from our wholeness, from the sacred being we truly are.
About 25 years ago I remember reading Anne Wilson Schaef's book When Society Becomes An Addict and that was a further push to go deeper. It is truly hard to see the forest through the trees. We are so immersed in addiction here in America. And it isn't just that 25% of all ER visits are by addicts trying to gain access to narcotics. It can also be something outwardly seen as "deeply spiritual." Yet, among the darkest wounds a child can endure is when the violence comes condoned by God because their parent says it is so. That is a very hard one to recover from. Alice Miller's For Your Own Good was another huge eye opener for me many years ago. My shelves upstairs and down are lined with books whose wisdom has been among that which not only saved my life, but also began to empower me with the consciousness of how to leave my children an entirely different legacy than the one blindly handed to me by my parents... and on back through the generations. Added onto that are the toxic aspects of American culture, which are also woven through its many layers of astonishing beauty and blessings.
What isn't embraced is passed on. It can be no other way. Either we work to become increasingly conscious or we don't. We always have the choice. Except for those who don't...This awareness always brings me back to the vulnerability of our children.
I share all of this with the deepest of humility. And I share because I have learned a lot the hard way, through truly excruciating experiences growing up and as an adult, including learning how in the world to raise healthy children. That is one of the most difficult things to learn, and especially if we have been victims of our culture and also once victims of abuse at the hands of a parent. Which my twin and I were. So I have made huge mistakes. AND I have been learning from them. I am fiercely and passionately committed to this path of embracing my mistakes as teachers and to live with the wisdom that I am learning. My life has certainly blessed me with innumerable "growth opportunities." We are all given these opportunities... if we live long enough and have enough support.
Years ago I heard this quote: "We will go as deep as the support we perceive is available to us." If we do not perceive support to be our authentic selves, we go into hiding. And the cost of working so hard to deny who we truly are can have devastating consequences. Certainly the suicide of my twin brother has been among the enormous teachers of this essential life lesson. Ultimately it was my twin's suicide which propelled me into coming out of hiding. And having children. I was fierce about not wanting my children to suffer, not as I had, not as my brother did, not as our family did. So many families appear all smiles on the outside, concealing the truth of the pain that is unattended on the inside...
How intently to we listen to our children, to all the children in our midst? How mindfully do we listen to our own hearts? How often do we catch ourselves acting out of our woundedness and choose to reach out to someone safe who can help us remember our wholeness while honoring our confusion, suffering, shame, fear and pain? What is our relationship with ourselves and with the people in our lives? How authentic are we able to be? So many questions I am mindful of needing to be asked....
Meanwhile, we can all grieve for 14 year old Emilio Hoffman and his family. Equally important - and as a means of allowing this tragic young death to not just be totally in vain - is to also open our hearts to grieving for Jared Michael Padgett, the 15 year old who killed him, and his family. There is a larger story here that we all can learn from and be transformed by. We can look deeply, painfully, empathically into the heart of this young person and the suffering that so devastated this teenager that he became compelled to arm himself with an AR-15 rifle, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a handgun and a knife, kill Emilio Hoffman in the school gymnasium and wound PE teacher Todd Rispler, then exchange gun fire with responding police officers before taking his life while sitting on a locker room toilet. We can look at this 15 year old's fascination and preoccupation with guns and the military, his condemnation and rage toward peers who smoked cigarettes and "took the Lord's name in vain", and the plan he had detailed in his journal to kill "sinners" at his school. These awarenesses exist side by side with an elder in his church who'd known the family for 25 years saying that Jared Michael Padgett was "deeply spiritual" and that his actions were "totally out of character." No one saw this coming.
We need to look more deeply. It is my belief that we each need to be that fierce in our caring for all the children everywhere. There are so many pieces to explore, to illuminate, to bring us individually and collectively to deeper awareness of why it is that so many of our children are either immersed in, or trying to shield themselves from, the violence in our culture and our world. This can be seen in our heavily armed country and a military that extends itself around the world while poverty and violence at home is epidemic. It is experienced in the media that continues to insist on "debating" global warming while droughts, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and devastating storms, heatwaves, and freezes plague our nation and the world with increasing relentlessness. This violence can be found in our families, in our schools and churches, in laws and economic systems, in American "exceptionalism" and fundamentalism, in any belief system which justifies or elevates an us against a Them, and in values that are professed but contradicted in practice. And it can be found in our own hearts and to the degree that we struggle to live authentically, to be aligned with that which we know - we know - most matters.
Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, it is my belief that we are all impacted by generational patterns, cultural belief systems, and much more that has wounded us and pushed us to turn away and not know what we know, not be who we are, not stand up and join stronger than ever with all those who are struggling to birth themselves and birth a better world, one which children yet unborn will thank us for. If we are alive and breathing, there is more work each and every one of us can do to grow more passionate about healing our hearts and extending compassion and caring to all, to all the children and to all beings. We can each increasingly manifest in our lives authenticity and awareness, wisdom and wholeness, beauty and joy, humility and strength, vulnerability and courage, kindness and compassion, healing and transformation, and visions and new stories which we are working to create within ourselves and this beautiful world we all share.
I sit here and weep for the children, for Emilio and Jared, for their families, for all the children and victims everywhere of violence. It is sad, so profoundly tragic to miss out on who we are and, therefore, to not know how to support our children in being who they most truly and deeply are. My deep prayer is that each and every one of us will increasingly take responsibility for looking more deeply - into ourselves, our families, our culture, the stories we believe and live by - and see what it is that serves us and what does not. By illuminating more and more pieces of the problem, we become empowered to create, live, breathe the solution.
This takes courage. And wanting to know, wanting to look, wanting to invite in the pain, the horror, the deep wounding that is part of all violent tragedies. Without this openness to learn, to truly embrace the lessons that are begging to be learned, the tragedies will just continue on and on and on. Crazy how war zones have existed in America since our beginning. Some are already aware that children killing children is a daily occurrence in our culture, especially in our larger cities. However, it takes the obvious movement of unthinkable violence into middle class schools to get the attention of many. Of course, the challenge is to hold our eyes and hearts open rather than shrink back into forgetfulness that things for our children are coming apart at the seams. Not just those other children out there in inner city LA or some third world country. It is increasingly children everywhere who are - to one degree or another - wearing the faces and acting out the symptoms that something is horribly wrong in America and in so many other places on Earth.
People who commit monstrous acts don't just fall from the sky. Yes, we absolutely must take gun control seriously and enact new laws. We must. We also absolutely must grow those services and resources which help and support and nourish children and families and communities - mental health resources, healthcare, addiction treatment centers. We need to transform our schools and churches and justice systems and families and cultural stories. Rather than the military, prisons, CEO's, the fossil fuel industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and on and on, we need to fund that which promotes healing, wholeness, awakening, and a more just and caring nation and world.
We need to look into our own hearts and come to experience and understand the pain in ourselves, our families, our communities, our work places, our culture and nation and planet. We need to stop destroying our Earth Mother and we need to stop lying and pretending that things such a global warming, empire building, profits over people, etc., etc. don't exist. Because they do and our children feel the truth. Or they just feel crazy. It is the craziness that comes when we say one thing and then teach our children something differently through our actions, or lack of them.
For me, it has been such an ongoing process to increasingly recognize all that injures, crushes, and cripples our hearts and the hearts of our children. We humans are all given experiences which propel us further into awakening, or more deeply into building our protective walls which work to keep us "comfortably numb." Or at least, that is the illusion.
Everything that shocks us into awareness, I believe, tells us that this isn't just something that happens to "those families out there" or to someone else's children. To live in this culture, in American culture, is to be wounded. Because we are a society drowning in denial. Of all other developed nations on Earth, we are the only one still debating global warming, the death penalty, healthcare, whether or not we need to care for our children, our elderly, our minorities, our mentally ill, our disabled, our veterans, our people. America is truly exceptional, but often not in the ways we like to believe. And our children feel that, they feel that something is wrong. It is crazy-making, especially to young tender spirits, to say one thing when reality is something else all together.
Violence comes in so many forms. A significant part of my 30 years of healing and awakening has involved learning to recognize, lower my tolerance for, set boundaries around, heal and transform violence. Anything which crushes a heart is a form of violence. Over the course of my gradual awakening, I have come to see that much of what passes as normal in America is wounding to our hearts, minds, bodies, spirits, and souls. Certainly all forms of addiction serve to cut us off from our wholeness, from the sacred being we truly are.
About 25 years ago I remember reading Anne Wilson Schaef's book When Society Becomes An Addict and that was a further push to go deeper. It is truly hard to see the forest through the trees. We are so immersed in addiction here in America. And it isn't just that 25% of all ER visits are by addicts trying to gain access to narcotics. It can also be something outwardly seen as "deeply spiritual." Yet, among the darkest wounds a child can endure is when the violence comes condoned by God because their parent says it is so. That is a very hard one to recover from. Alice Miller's For Your Own Good was another huge eye opener for me many years ago. My shelves upstairs and down are lined with books whose wisdom has been among that which not only saved my life, but also began to empower me with the consciousness of how to leave my children an entirely different legacy than the one blindly handed to me by my parents... and on back through the generations. Added onto that are the toxic aspects of American culture, which are also woven through its many layers of astonishing beauty and blessings.
What isn't embraced is passed on. It can be no other way. Either we work to become increasingly conscious or we don't. We always have the choice. Except for those who don't...This awareness always brings me back to the vulnerability of our children.
I share all of this with the deepest of humility. And I share because I have learned a lot the hard way, through truly excruciating experiences growing up and as an adult, including learning how in the world to raise healthy children. That is one of the most difficult things to learn, and especially if we have been victims of our culture and also once victims of abuse at the hands of a parent. Which my twin and I were. So I have made huge mistakes. AND I have been learning from them. I am fiercely and passionately committed to this path of embracing my mistakes as teachers and to live with the wisdom that I am learning. My life has certainly blessed me with innumerable "growth opportunities." We are all given these opportunities... if we live long enough and have enough support.
Years ago I heard this quote: "We will go as deep as the support we perceive is available to us." If we do not perceive support to be our authentic selves, we go into hiding. And the cost of working so hard to deny who we truly are can have devastating consequences. Certainly the suicide of my twin brother has been among the enormous teachers of this essential life lesson. Ultimately it was my twin's suicide which propelled me into coming out of hiding. And having children. I was fierce about not wanting my children to suffer, not as I had, not as my brother did, not as our family did. So many families appear all smiles on the outside, concealing the truth of the pain that is unattended on the inside...
How intently to we listen to our children, to all the children in our midst? How mindfully do we listen to our own hearts? How often do we catch ourselves acting out of our woundedness and choose to reach out to someone safe who can help us remember our wholeness while honoring our confusion, suffering, shame, fear and pain? What is our relationship with ourselves and with the people in our lives? How authentic are we able to be? So many questions I am mindful of needing to be asked....
Meanwhile, we can all grieve for 14 year old Emilio Hoffman and his family. Equally important - and as a means of allowing this tragic young death to not just be totally in vain - is to also open our hearts to grieving for Jared Michael Padgett, the 15 year old who killed him, and his family. There is a larger story here that we all can learn from and be transformed by. We can look deeply, painfully, empathically into the heart of this young person and the suffering that so devastated this teenager that he became compelled to arm himself with an AR-15 rifle, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a handgun and a knife, kill Emilio Hoffman in the school gymnasium and wound PE teacher Todd Rispler, then exchange gun fire with responding police officers before taking his life while sitting on a locker room toilet. We can look at this 15 year old's fascination and preoccupation with guns and the military, his condemnation and rage toward peers who smoked cigarettes and "took the Lord's name in vain", and the plan he had detailed in his journal to kill "sinners" at his school. These awarenesses exist side by side with an elder in his church who'd known the family for 25 years saying that Jared Michael Padgett was "deeply spiritual" and that his actions were "totally out of character." No one saw this coming.
We need to look more deeply. It is my belief that we each need to be that fierce in our caring for all the children everywhere. There are so many pieces to explore, to illuminate, to bring us individually and collectively to deeper awareness of why it is that so many of our children are either immersed in, or trying to shield themselves from, the violence in our culture and our world. This can be seen in our heavily armed country and a military that extends itself around the world while poverty and violence at home is epidemic. It is experienced in the media that continues to insist on "debating" global warming while droughts, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and devastating storms, heatwaves, and freezes plague our nation and the world with increasing relentlessness. This violence can be found in our families, in our schools and churches, in laws and economic systems, in American "exceptionalism" and fundamentalism, in any belief system which justifies or elevates an us against a Them, and in values that are professed but contradicted in practice. And it can be found in our own hearts and to the degree that we struggle to live authentically, to be aligned with that which we know - we know - most matters.
Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, it is my belief that we are all impacted by generational patterns, cultural belief systems, and much more that has wounded us and pushed us to turn away and not know what we know, not be who we are, not stand up and join stronger than ever with all those who are struggling to birth themselves and birth a better world, one which children yet unborn will thank us for. If we are alive and breathing, there is more work each and every one of us can do to grow more passionate about healing our hearts and extending compassion and caring to all, to all the children and to all beings. We can each increasingly manifest in our lives authenticity and awareness, wisdom and wholeness, beauty and joy, humility and strength, vulnerability and courage, kindness and compassion, healing and transformation, and visions and new stories which we are working to create within ourselves and this beautiful world we all share.
I sit here and weep for the children, for Emilio and Jared, for their families, for all the children and victims everywhere of violence. It is sad, so profoundly tragic to miss out on who we are and, therefore, to not know how to support our children in being who they most truly and deeply are. My deep prayer is that each and every one of us will increasingly take responsibility for looking more deeply - into ourselves, our families, our culture, the stories we believe and live by - and see what it is that serves us and what does not. By illuminating more and more pieces of the problem, we become empowered to create, live, breathe the solution.
With love, compassion, and caring for all ~
Molly
More information can be found here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2657529/Our-family-does-not-condone-violence-hatred-Family-Reynolds-high-school-shooter-say-deeply-confused-shocked-sons-deadly-rampage.html
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♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥
More information can be found here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2657529/Our-family-does-not-condone-violence-hatred-Family-Reynolds-high-school-shooter-say-deeply-confused-shocked-sons-deadly-rampage.html
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| At my brother and father's gravesides, Pine Lake Cemetery, Bloomfield Township, Michigan |
Wow! Emilio Hoffman was born on the very day (July 15, 1999, the 900th anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem during the first Crusade) that the ancestors of the Crusades apologize to the people of the Middle East for their actions! This day was special!
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