The Texas church shooting

Facebook and Twitter are full of exactly what you'd expect. Mockery of prayer. Vague calls for "gun control." Attempts to implicate Republicans when, once again, it seems that this guy had no particular political leanings. Improper use of the word "terrorist," which refers to one who engages in a shocking violent act to make some statement about an agenda he wishes to impose on society. We do know he was a militant atheist, but so far no broader plans to scare people into eschewing religion have surfaced. He also had a bad marital track record, and indeed, the fact that his ex-in-laws attended the church seems to be a prominent factor.

Since he wasn't a terrorist, the kinds of measures we take to address jihad are of no use here. Unless somehow he got a dealer at a gun show to sell him his weapon, no gun laws would have prevented this.

One aspect of reality this, like the recent Las Vegas massacre and indeed even the avalanche of jihadist attacks over the last several decades, makes us squarely face is that this fallen realm is no place to look for total safety. An occasional tragedy, whether of an accidental nature or the result of a human weakness like sin or insanity, is a statistical inevitability.

There does seem to be an uptick in this kind of mass-scale indulgence in carnage, and while profiles of perpetrators present some common traits - lack of social connections, difficulty tending to such connection as are made in a healthy manner, some obsessions with matters tangential to the perpetrator's life - in varying degrees, there's something these beasts have in common with a way larger swath of modern society, a swath that is obviously never going to let loose with a barrage of gunfire. That something is a hardened heart.

And this gets us back to the above-mentioned mockery of prayer. The shorthand for the point I'm making, I suppose, is the trite-yet-spot-on observation that we have removed God from every aspect of post-American life: education, business, sports, artistic endeavors, friendship, romance, even religion to a large degree. Fewer people every day see any reason to engage the world from a place of humility. We defend positions we have formulated with no reference to anything larger than ourselves . Hence, we go looking for remedies for ever-more prevalent ills in yet more arcane policies, regulations and laws.

The snide and bitter pronouncements found in such abundance today to the contrary, prayer is exactly what's needed. Certainly prayers for the comfort of survivors of the shooting victims, but also as big a collective prayer as we can muster for the American people to really and truly turn toward the Author of Meaning with contrition and a yearning for reconciliation filling our hearts to their brims.