I'm tired

I’m tired.

I’m tired of writing columns and articles about school shootings.

I’m tired of looking my kids in the face and telling them it will be OK, when I don’t really have any assurance that is true.

I’m tired of reading emails from my kids’ schools about their security and what new measures they are taking to try to keep their students safe.

Not that they shouldn’t do what they can for the safety of their students. Of course not. But I’m tired that it is necessary, and that we dream it would be effective. We too want to believe it will be alright. That it won’t happen to us. That we won’t be the mother in the newspaper photo running in bare feet towards the school, shoes dangling from her hands. That our children won’t be the little boy on the news wondering how his friend, the one who had protected him by covering his body, is doing at the hospital. That our children, God forbid, won’t be the ones who don’t make out alive.

The Aug. 27 shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School hit hard. Hard because it was a Catholic school, yes, and hard because the children were at Mass in the church when it happened. And because it was the first week of school, on a spectacular Midwestern late summer day, and it felt so close to home.

So close, when I saw Facebook pictures of the students from my kids’ elementary school participating in teaching Mass with the pastor that very Wednesday morning. So close, when the principal of Annunciation said that older students protected younger ones, pushing them under the pews first. They were right there, he said, because they were “Mass buddies.”

Mass buddies, like kids here are. But usually it means having older students remind their younger schoolmates to be quiet in church and helping them find the right page of the hymnal.

After the shooting, the pastor of the parish at my kids’ grade school sent the usual email, telling parents what security measures were in place. There was a new one; from now on, the church doors will be locked against people trying to come in when the school Mass starts.

In some ways, it makes sense. The school doors, after all, are locked, and no one is admitted without checking in at the office and getting a pass, and there is no mechanism for that in church.

And yet. It would not have helped in Minnesota, where the shooter stood outside the church and fired through a window. Are we to find a way to make stained glass bulletproof?

And all the procedures for locked school doors and checking in at the office have proven ineffective against heavily armed people determined on killing and destruction.

We want to feel safe, we want to make our children feel safe, in an unsafe world, in a country awash in guns, in a culture where we talk about the safety of children but don’t do enough to promote it, not against guns or car accidents or hunger.

Of course I am praying for the Ascension Catholic Church and School community, and of course I am praying for all of our children. But we — all of us — must come together to make all of our children safer.