Please don't indulge in godless modern paganism and set up homely, self-indulgent makeshift memorials with cheap flowers and teddy bears. Don't hold hands and sing bad pop songs.
Go to church. That's what it's for. For centuries, people smarter than you and with more finely honed aesthetics worked on rituals that actually do what they're supposed to do.
Those people who hung around outside the Palace after Princess Diana's death looked like fools and you will too if you cave to the lure of cheap grace and post-modern superficiality. Those British mourners displayed as much cringe-inducing, pan-generational learned helplessness as Katrina survivors, but their laziness and ignorance was spiritual.
Worse, you will still feel as empty as you did before, maybe more so, and wonder why.
Don't make America look stupid and shallow to the whole world by Disneyfying your grief. [Emphasis Kathy's.]
Nobody I knew was at Virginia Tech, and certainly not among the victims. That's true of most of America. Whatever grieving most of us do will have to be in the abstract, that such things happen in a fallen, sinful world and that we are part of that fallenness. Church is a good place to mourn that; sidewalk vigils and TV cameras are not.
For those who did lose a loved one at the school, church is an even better place to be. There's an immense comfort in coming into contact with the eternal. Far be it from me to dictate how somebody whose child, or sibling, or friend was killed should behave about it, but I suspect that those people are exactly the ones who won't be putting their sorrow on display for CNN. Churches are for mourners; sidewalk shrines are for attention hounds.
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