In memory of the Dunblane children

This Week’s Winner

Rodolfo “Tata” Javier, 30, is taking up courses in software applications and web designing while managing his own business. He has a degree in Education from the National Teachers College, the country’s premier institution for educators.

Why do bad things happen to good people? If you ask 10 different people, you might get 10 different answers — but they are just tentative guesses, futile attempts to understand that which is beyond understanding. Nobody has the monopoly on wisdom; nobody knows all the answers.

Or perhaps, there isn’t any.

In the end, all we have left is faith, acceptance, and the human need to move on.

The deaths of children summon the most heartbreaking of grief, the most poignant of yearning for what-could-have-been. Even as the Bible says there is a time for everything, an untimely death is like a treacherous thief that steals the memories of today and the fulfillment of tomorrow. The future will never be as we want it to be, but it will come, as sure as rivers flow into the seas; and with it, we must be there to face it, no matter how raw the emotions, how deep the wounds, how the torturous the journey.

Behind every book is a story; and behind every story are the lives of people who have loved, labored, dreamed and tried to grasp the riddles of the universe. And behind the dark clouds of agony glimmers the evanescence of hope…and redemption.

On the morning of March 13, 1996, six school children and their teacher were senselessly massacred by a gunman at Dunblane Primary One in central Scotland. It was a tragedy that stunned the world. This is the story of the seemingly miraculous events that followed.

And it is also the story that illuminates the true meaning of universal kinship and the glory of humanity.

As the shockwaves spread across the globe, a young man in Alberta, Canada felt the loss at its most palpable and visceral. Just a month earlier, Chris Armstrong’s mother was murdered, and the pain was still burning fiercely white-hot in his heart and soul. Chris, more than any other person of his generation, knew what the ones left behind were going through. I have to let them know I’m thinking about them, he resolved.

Galvanized into action, he went into the amazing territory called cyberspace; somebody had already set up a website to act as a message center for the Dunblane infamy, but it quickly became, instead, the repository of the various messages of sympathy from strangers from all over the world.

When Chris’ mother died, a friend sent him a card with a poem that gave him a measure of comfort. He posted it: “A rose once grew where all could see,/ Sheltered beside a garden wall,/ And, as the days passed swiftly by,/ it spread its branches, straight and tall…” The poem goes on to say that the rose died and was raised to heaven by a beam of light.

The last part says tenderly:

 “Now, you who deeply feel its loss,/ be comforted — the rose blooms there,/ its beauty even greater now,/ nurtured by God’s own loving care.”

Wiping away his tears, Chris wrote a personal message: “I hope that you can find comfort in mourning that others care and are thinking of you.”

The outpouring of moral support was overwhelming. It was Ric Bean, a 48-year-old graphic designer from London, who first suggested the idea of compiling all the messages in book form. The idea is a compendium of illustrated pages with special typefaces, inspired by the Book of Kells, the priceless Celtic manuscript.

Bean, like the towering historical figures Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, has been emotionally crippled by a severe chronic depression, and he was working on the book at the extreme edges of raw emotions. He would work at it every day, but after two or three hours, he would just break down and cry.

During the service, Rev. Colin McIntosh of the Dunblane Cathedral, articulated the question that everybody was asking: “How could God allow this to happen?”

He had no answers, he confessed. But “Our only comfort lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that our children should die; that in those fatal, frightening moments in the school gymnasium, God’s was the first of all our hearts to break.”

These words appear in the opening pages of the Dunblane Book of Remembrance, my favorite book, and without a doubt, are a refuge and a source of solace for millions around the world whose lives became a hallow, screaming darkness by the deaths of their loved ones.

The moving force behind the book was Glasgow detective Jim McNulty. When he personally took the first copy to Dunblane, the school headmaster, Ron Taylor, tried to find the words that could adequately describe what happened: “It tells us just how deeply this terrible event affected the outside world. It reminds us that we are not alone in our suffering.”

The letters are as varied as the people who sent them. A fellow Scot named Paul, aged 19, writes: “I know that your school starts back tomorrow. I know that this will be a very hard time for you, and I would like to let you know that me and my Primary Six class in Kelvindale, Glasgow are thinking of all of you at this time.”

Nancy Zingrone and Carlos Alvarado of Puerto Rico write: “On this island, where crime is high and guns are plentiful, we still cannot help but stop and send our love and hopes and sense of common sadness to those suffering in Dunblane.”

Mr. and Mrs. Pixton of Melbourne, Australia “wept when we heard the news report.”

The highly inspiring and unprecedented volume has been read by millions, almost all of them with tears running down their faces — and the seeds of hope beginning to grow in their hearts. As this beautiful book quotes the Scriptures:

 “Those who go through the desolate valleys will find it a place of springs, for the early rains have covered it with pools of water.”