AFTER DUNBLANE A letter to God Dp God, ’'m_ sitting in a corner of this quiet cathedral [St. Giles]. | hope You are listening.
My brain is sodden with wettest tears. My thinking is waterlogged. And through my soddened mind the pain shoots — again and again. I’m unable to think clearly at all. Yet, | have to try to think. Can thinking dilute the incessant feeling of utter dereliction?
Why did those kids have to die? Do you know? If so, then please tell me. The injured kids too, choked in their pain with confusion — ‘Is this for real, or is it fantasy? What is really happening to me?’ | have searched for you over the long years. In the Mystery your voice is hardly a whisper — Your hand is absent — Your eyes are hidden.
Yet through the vast void of nothingness | stretch out to claim from You the hope — the dear hope that these kids’ bitter deaths are not in vain. Please show me — please help us all to find the truth if there is any truth. | know | can’t blame You for these callous deaths. But I’m utterly afraid that in the anger that twists my sodden mind, that the blame becomes mine — ours — all of us who now know nothing else but unending weeping. The children are dead. Others fight for life. The loving bodies that tenderly gave each of them their separate births are now paralysed. Mothers have lost their most precious possession — the fruit of their own womb — their blood and their body lost. When will the agony cease?
Those guns — | wish | could collect up all the guns, and the toy guns, and dump them at the bottom of the Loch, where they can remain for ever with the Monster. Consigned to hell — for guns are the toys of hell. The Loch would swallow up these tools of hell — an evil burial place — a sodden burial place. Liberating us all to follow with a new life without guns.
And the TV — | wish | could find the power to ensure that for evermore there would be days and days — months and months — years and years of programmes without guns. Programmes SoF Magazine No. 26, July 1996 without the obsessional and senseless spilling of blood — a new diet of entertainment to the memory of Dunblane.
What, | wonder, do You think about Thomas H?
Is there mercy for him? | hate what he has done.
I'm left feeling deeply confused. My fear is that in fact he ‘died’ years ago. And since the light of love was extinguished in his life, he lived for his death every day — caught up in an evil net until he gave his death to those he could not love.
Please God — please let love stirred into justice bring peace to them — to him — and to all of us.
For | know that deep down his bitterness has, on occasion, pierced my own soul as well.
Tenderly now | kiss the memory of Victoria, and Emma, Melissa, Charlotte, Kevin, Ross, David, Mhairi, Brett, Abigail, Emily, Sophie, John, Joanna, Hannah, Megan, and Gwen Mayor. Oh God, will You kiss the memory of each one too?
In the Mystery of Your Being — in Your Heart — quietly cherish them with the touch of Your gentle hand — and come here — right here — come to our Dunblane citadel of suffering. Come through our confusion, through the mist, and across the ground of unknowing. Step with us — please — as in the hallowdness of crystal memory, they may, somehow live for evermore.
Then | will know that more than anything else, in Your own impotence You do care. So now | can shout — the future is red with promise, and all will be well. | add ‘Amen’. And | await Your Response.
R. 16th March 1996. 0 “Tragedy just few weeks” ago. “It was as if a Blanket of Desolation descended ACrOSs - Scotland. ‘There were It is concemed with hard and “hese pa - and 1 assume all Ss Of Fes are | involved in SoF Magazine No. 26, July 1996 NOT A ‘SLIVER’ BUT AN ESSENCE ...
A letter to God written in the aftermath of the Dunblane school shooting, subtitled 'A letter to God'.