Right before Christmas, two tragic events burst through the quietness of early New England winter: the attack at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, which left two deceased young students; and the murder of a celebrated MIT professor in his own home in Brookline, Massachusetts. We pray for their souls, and for consolation of those left behind.
The acts seemed unrelated, but they were soon viewed by law enforcement as one unfolding event -- and it all ended in the saddest and most melancholic of places, a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, just north of the Massachusetts state line, where the perpetrator, a once brilliant student, was found already dead, after having committed suicide.
School attacks and murders are unfortunately all too common in many places (though not so much in wealthy New England towns and suburbs), but two aspects called our attention from the beginning in this case: that the oldest of bad human sentiments, envy/jealousy, was at the core of the attacks; and the utter emptiness of its denouement.
Envy and jealousy were, of course, the prime motives behind the first murder, that of Abel by Cain.
Now, law enforcement authorities have released the transcripts of the videos made by the murderer right before he committed suicide. They are the ramblings of a soul twisted and consumed by envy, but there is a gem inside it: "In my take on all of this is that I think the world cannot be redeemed."
We may call it perhaps an "anti-gem", because it contains the essence of everything that is wrong with the modern world, but reveals so much about what is right in the world because of one EVENT: the Incarnation, Life, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Signs of the CHRIST EVENT were all around the perpetrator: in his native Portugal, where his own birthplace (Santarem) is named after a martyr (Saint Irene); in his own pilgrimage of death, in which he rambled from a city named after the Divine PROVIDENCE of our Lord to the empty storage space where he took his own life, named after the city of Redemption itself, Jerusalem (SALEM).
The signs of redemption were everywhere, but he chose, as so many of our contemporaries, to live and die in a world where the love and mercy of God do not seem to exist. He believed the world cannot be redeemed because this is the world that he saw: a pre-Christian world, a world unredeemed and unredeemable.
When everything seems wrong, we know Divine Providence is in charge. Trust the plan, the Victory has been won, Christ's Death and Resurrection redeemed the world forever.
