How School Shootings Make Children Think About Death

Opinion|What I Told My Sunday School Students About Death

I was a Sunday school teacher for 30-plus years until recently, in a small liberal church in Northern California that rose out of the civil rights movement. I learned early on that when you have a lot of poor kids as students, you get to know tragedy up close — addicted or dead parents, shootings, the injuries and mortification of racism and poverty. So we talked more about tragedy than you might expect.

I never tried to comfort them with nice Christian bumper sayings or platitudes, especially after school shootings like the one at the back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. “Hey, kids. Yay! God’s got a plan! Phew.” Still, we did believe that death was a pretty major change of address and that God caught the children as they left this life.

But when we read in the Hebrew Bible that weeping may last the night and that joy comes in the morning, I explained that this does not mean literally at dawn, like a new bike from Walmart. We’re talking long dark nights of the soul. And the psalmist didn’t mean joy joy, like Pop Rocks and the Village People. He meant relief and peace, eventually.

There should be one inviolable rule: Children are not shot or starved to death.

Driving to church after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, I remembered a commentator saying that the measure of a nation is how many small coffins it allows. Of course, this explanation would not be useful to the younger ones in my class, two 9-year-old girls, or even to the teenagers, but it provided me with a hit of self-righteousness: We all know what the problem is. We allow people to own and use military-grade guns.

I always took my kids out to our small and slightly chaotic classroom midway through the adult service. They followed me like ducklings because they had been sprung and there would be snacks.

On that specific Sunday, I thought about going out of order and giving them their snacks first, before our discussion, to let them numb out a little on chips and sugar. There is so much evil and meanness coming from so many directions these days that we shut down and numb out on food, shopping, drinking, striving, whatever. After a few days, we forget to remember.