`Not God's will' / Uvalde victims remembered with memorial service in Monroe
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misspelled Ackerman's first name. Her first name is "Sara."
Three weeks have passed since 19 children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. In remembrance of their death by yet another lone gunman, pastors and members of the public held a memorial in Monroe.
Visitors were welcomed into the Martenson Family Funeral Home-Allore Chapel on Elm Avenue to remember the victims and help the community process another attack at an American school.
Monroe resident Sara Ackerman said she had been simply waiting for her own 8-year- old son to come home from school at the time.
“I just started crying," she said. "It was really overwhelming just to hear about, to think that that was real, because it is hard to think that it is real sometimes. The first thing I thought is that it was just going to get harder and harder to see it, especially when we started seeing their pictures and hearing their names.”
Deacon Mike Stewart of St. Mary’s Catholic Church emphasized the names of the victims in his sermon, and his perspective as a father and a grandfather on the shooting. Stewart said that someone told him that day that “they would come, but it is an inconvenient time. I said ‘there’s never a convenient time for something like this.’” He then read a passage from Mark’s Chapter 10 of the New Testament, which held a passage of Jesus interacting with children.
“This past couple of weeks I had a very unique and a very unfortunate experience. I had three funerals in one day and two of them were babies," Stewart said. "Both of those babies were unexpected deaths. Like any other of us in this room, you’d expect to walk in and find grieving people. That was certainly the case.
The others as they were grieving all said the same thing: ‘It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.’ That became my mantra for the longest time. Yet I think about these children; grocery stores in Buffalo … and I’m drawn to that gospel: ‘Let the Children come to me, do not prevent them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to those just such as these,’” Stewart added. “And then he ups the ante and tells us that unless we think like children, we’re not going to understand this.”
Pastor Melodye Van Oudeusden of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church said the mass shootings that happen so regularly “are in my opinion, not God’s will.” While emphasizing the importance of prayer, she also encouraged everyone to “do something.” While what doing something means can be individual, Van Oudusden said it could include contacting your member of Congress, securing guns or helping grieving people. She quoted a psalm.
“When we look around our world, and the tragic suffering that is so widespread, and the injustices that seem so prevalent, it may seem obscene to think about finding joy in mourning. … How can any of us, in good conscience, feel happy, when there are so many suffering so desperately? And when we look at the tragedy around us – and we don’t have to look far – it seems almost delusional to sing praises to the Lord. But the praises of the psalms don’t come from naïve delusions about life. They come from the depth of our own suffering. They look at that pain and that suffering from a different perspective,” Van Oudeuseden said.
Like many before him, the gunman was 18. Youth Pastor Caleb Weaver of the Stewart Road Church of God told the assembled few who came to the somberly lit funeral home that, “it actually hurt a little more that it could happen anywhere.” Weaver said it made him wonder what would happen if he went to his youth pastor club and found a few kids missing. He called on increasing caring for the community, praying more, and caring about this issue all the time, and not just when it happens.
“Did we prepare them? Did we get them ready? Did we care about their souls enough? Did we focus on the one kid who may have mental disabilities, who might be struggling, and may be the one with the gun? Did we focus on him a little more, and did we stop it from even happening? Did we care that much?” Weaver said. “Did we?”
The Sunday service was not the first of its kind created by funeral home director Tom Trouten. As the Monroe News previously reported, Trouten organized a similar service after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2014 – a similar attack in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were also killed by a young man with the same weapon after he had killed his mother. Trouten said that in both cases the mission was the same – to provide a space where people can come together, grieve and pay their respects.
On the same day as the service, a bipartisan group of ten Republican Senators and 10 Democratic Senators announced a deal to implement some gun control measures, hoping it will thread the needle between the deeply partisan divide on the solution to this recurring tragedy through the evenly divided Senate to get the 60 votes to pass. If successful, it will then move on to the House if passed. According to USA Today, the deal proposes increased spending on mental health and school safety measures, and adds protections to try to prevent people with domestic violence or mental health issues from accessing guns.
It is yet to be seen if this legislation can pass or if it leads to further legislation.
This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: `Not God's will' / Uvalde victims remembered with memorial service in Monroe
