May choirs of angels lead you into paradise….

“Auntie Em, it’s a twister, it’s a twister!”

Yes, Dorothy, and there will come more, and more, and more after that.

At my friend Todd’s site, Catholic Sensibility, he’s engaged a couple of articles echoing a great deal of rhetoric concerning causality for the “Tragedy in Tucson.” I’m not going there, here.


“Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere,
Aeternam habeas requiem.”

We are mandated to sing well, and thus twice pray according to Augustine, this as we commend the care of the soul of the departed to God’s will.

My father and my wife’s father, to the best our knowledge as we thankfully weren’t present, both took their own lives. Would we, knowing both that their acts were grave, mortal sin, but also knowing that according to our Church’s Catechism their souls are disposed to the mercy of God, sing “In paradisum” for them if we had it in our power to revisit those horrific moments of our young lives? Yes. Amen. So be it.

Beyond that, songs and words of prayer and reconciliation, not derision and condemnation should be the voiced thoughts and feelings from our hearts, minds and souls.

Not just for those directly involved, killed, wounded, recovering and mourning from the inexplicable act, but for the tortured soul of the perpetrator, his parents, his friends, for those who likely will agonize over what more they could have done that could have altered the chronology of events that has catapulted more chaos into our daily clamor.

Prayers for the school administrators, faculty and fellow students of Loughner, who wondered in fear and took tentative steps to mitigate his potential danger. Prayers for his parents, for the police, the Fish and Game warden who stopped him for running a red light Saturday morning, ran his plates according to protocol, and sent him on his way. Prayers for the Sporting Goods employees who processed his federal application for a handgun permit and then delivered it to him for purchase with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and multiple magazines to load, the data entry clerks and officials who process and evaluate those forms for any digital red flags assessing his legal right to purchase a handgun. Prayers for a system so clearly capable of creating digital dialogue among regulatory agencies, but for sundry reasons cannot or will not construct them for our own protection, as has been done in the wake of 9/11 and the Murrow Oklahoma bombing aftermaths with profiling and TSA installations.

We, who remain for now, cannot “requiescat in pacem.” We have to love, forgive, share, welcome, console, visit, feed, and pray.