Yesterday—the day of the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis—was the first day of school for my oldest children. The two weeks leading up to this day included countless calls of “Almost there!” with sympathetic parents struggling to wrangle children in the park or parking lot, mothers and fathers who also spent the last three months navigating an endless stream of camps and half-day camps and requests for play dates and fishing trips and pick up your shoes, really, I mean it, and we are not leaving until you put your shoes on, and I said no dessert, O.K., fine, just the small ice cream, though. All of it loving but exhausting, and culminating in that day when my children, with some mixture of nervousness and excitement, headed back to their Catholic school classrooms and friends and recess and routine, and all of us got a little bit of relief. 

I know it is good for them to be there, at our little parish school, with its gym that also serves as a  cafeteria and auditorium. Where at 8:30 each morning they, too, are praying as a faith community, gathering to say the Memorare and recite the school rules and celebrate birthdays and gasp with delight as friends arrive. Yet when I heard the news that two children were killed and many others were injured during the Annunciation Catholic School Mass, a part of me felt like I should go get my own children, bring them home, never let them out of my sight. 

There’s nothing about a shooting at a Catholic school that is more or less tragic than a shooting at any other school. Each death of a child to gun violence is horrific. But the more the details of the setting of any tragedy overlap with your own life, the closer that tragedy feels: That car accident that happened while you were safe at home—but at the intersection you drive through all the time—feels like a near-miss. It is irrational but understandable.

You can picture it. The Catholic school Mass, with the kindergarteners squirming and the seventh-graders lectoring and the third-graders altar serving and the second-graders bringing up all sorts of extra gifts—globes and books and statues and pencils, in addition to the bread and wine, one kid per cruet—so more children will get a role, so everyone will know that our church is one where you get to participate and be active, and you matter, and you are loved by God and this whole community, and that’s why your parents send you here, because that matters to them, too. 

In a statement, Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore wrote, “Whenever one part of the Body of Christ is wounded, we feel the pain as if it were our very own children.” Indeed: I am not heartbroken simply because I fear the same thing might happen to my own family. My heart breaks because the children who have died from gun violence—at Annunciation and throughout the nation—are ours, all of us belonging to one another. I am not worried because the worst thing might happen, but because it already has happened, again and again, and we have done virtually nothing to stop it. Too many leaders refuse to restrict access to guns, to support mental health resources, to encourage strong communities before tragedy, rather than after. Too many citizens live as though a right to bear arms outweighs a student’s right to go to school in Minneapolis, Littleton, Blacksburg, Newtown, Uvalde, Parkland, Nashville and come home alive. 

“We, as a community, have a responsibility to make sure that no child, no parent, no teacher ever has to experience what we’ve experienced today. Ever again…” Matt DeBoer, principal of Annunciation Catholic School, said in a press conference. “There’s an African proverb that says, ‘When you pray, move your feet.’ So I beg you, I ask you to please pray, but don’t stop with your words.”

The Angel said to Mary: “The Lord is with you.” On Wednesday, one could have been forgiven for wondering whether he still is. We, too, are “greatly troubled.” Yet over and over we, as a nation, as a community, fail to protect our children. 

And Mary said to the Angel: “How can this be?”

•••

The day of the shooting at Annunciation, I pass buses full of schoolchildren on the way to pick up my own. I think of how many buses are carrying children home across America every day and how most of them will be fine. And I wonder how anyone can really be fine in a world that so often feels anything but. 

At dismissal, my son and daughter burst from the school doors, arms flung wide, so they can offer me a quick hug before handing over their backpacks and running to the lawn beside our parish church to play and hang from trees before I usher them back to the car. 

On the car ride home, on the afternoon of the Annunciation shooting, my newly minted fourth grader declared the day “kinda dull” without his two friends who changed schools. He tells me that his friend Matthew’s hair now “kinda has a yellowish tinge on top,” and I wonder if Sun In could be making a stylistic comeback. His friend Billy has built two forts at home, both a ground fort and a tree fort, and he is open to receiving letters on how to improve either, and my son is eager to assess and write said letters. Then all three of my kids fight over which one of them was the first to spot a sign for a roofing company on someone’s lawn, and then a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that my youngest has refused to eat flies off her lap onto the floor of the car, along with some stray pieces of cantaloupe.

They don’t know, I keep thinking. They don’t know, not yet. And every day I send them out and I know: the shooting, yes, but also the un-fine-ness of it all. And I hope and I pray, and I also feel powerless to stop it. 

In “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis writes:

When we ask ourselves what kind of world we want to leave behind, we think in the first place of its general direction, its meaning and its values…. Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain…. The effects of the present imbalance can only be reduced by our decisive action, here and now. We need to reflect on our accountability before those who will have to endure the dire consequences.

He was writing about the environment, and yet….

Yesterday, when I drove to the school at dismissal, there was a town police officer sitting in a squad car parked in our parish school parking lot. Just in case.

And last summer, they replaced the old doors of the school building with ones containing tinted, bulletproof glass that lock automatically when they shut and therefore also automatically annoy the CYO basketball teams, because someone has to monitor the door and stand in the foyer between the sweaty gym and the frozen New England air during the winter season and make sure people do and don’t get in.

They’re the sort of doors where, once you’re inside the school, you’re not supposed to let anyone else in. So you try to stand far enough away from the entrance that you aren’t spotted by the people who are trying to get inside but are waiting for the school secretary to open the door, even though they know you could let them in. But you can’t let them in because maybe they are Bad People except you’re pretty sure you saw them at the Bingo Night, so they’re probably not, but what if that was someone else you’re thinking of?

What if. What if.

Then the angel said to Mary: “Do not be afraid…” 

•••

A couple of years back, the year my oldest child started first grade, I was tucking him into bed when he turned to me and asked, “Do you know what the fire alarm at our school sounds like?”

“What?”

“Whoo hoo whooo hoo,” he said, racing through the oooos. It was not an unusual-sounding siren.

“Very nice,” I said. “Sounds good.”

“And do you know what a lockdown is?” he asked.

My stomach dropped. “Tell me,” I said.

“It’s when we have to shut all the doors in the school and we all sit down on the floor together.”

I pictured my child crammed into a corner with his classmates, the children that had run like crazy through our yard during his shark-themed fifth birthday party. My husband chased them with an inflatable shark pool floatie I had ordered from Amazon at the last minute, despite the fact that we do not have a pool and the forecast called for rain. These were the children who shook little plastic eggs filled with rice to keep time for the children’s musician I had hired to entertain them. I pictured these children all sitting silently on the floor together in an old Catholic school.

“And do you know that all the doors in the school lock, so that you can’t open them, except for the teachers because all of them have keys?”

“That’s good,” I say. “And why do you do a lockdown?”

He seemed stumped: “Maybe a fire?”

“Well…” I said.

He reconsidered: “But most likely then we would all just leave the building.”

“Yeah,” I said, “most likely.” Which is what every parent thinks, but always with some unlikely thing sitting like a stone in their stomach.

My son rested his head on my shoulder and started singing softly to himself, a tune he composed in real time: Bum bum bump bum…

Any other night I would have told him to quiet down, to go to bed.

But that night, I let him sing. And I lay beside him and held his hand until he sang himself to sleep.