Break Their Teeth

What evil cannot ever comprehend is Love; thus, evil cannot ever understand that Love is more terrible than all the hatred evil might muster.

     “Yes,” Stanhope said again. “Very. Only—you must forgive me; it comes from doing so much writing, but when I say ‘terribly’ I think I mean ‘full of terror’. A dreadful goodness.”
     “I don’t see how goodness can be dreadful,” Miss Fox said, with a shade of resentment in her voice. “If things are good they’re not terrifying, are they?”
     “It was you who said ‘terribly’,” Stanhope reminded her with a smile, “I only agreed.”
     “And if things are terrifying,” Pauline put in, her eyes half-closed and her head turned away as if she asked a casual question rather of the world than of him, “can they be good?”
     He looked down on her. “Yes, surely,” he said, with more energy. “Are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?”
- Charles Williams, Descent into Hell, Chapter I, 1937.

On Monday, March 27, AD 2023, I was absentmindedly eating a late lunch, and I happened to glance at the news: something I rarely do. Breaking news: school shooting. Hmm. And I see that it was a Christian school. Hmm. And so I read on—it was in Tennessee. Hmm. Oh, it was in Nashville? Hmm. No mention of the name of the school. And I read, still yet almost absentmindedly, of how the murderer started in this or that hallway, that this many people were killed, and—and then there’s a break in the article, in the news copy. There’s a video player. It’s paused, sitting on its thumbnail preview. In the foreground is some journalist or whatever; in the background is a residential intersection. But it’s—no, surely, it cannot—no, no, no—

And I hurriedly type a web search: “nashville christian school shooting,” and find another news article. And click on it. And this article has a photograph: a photograph of the school, of the church. And I reflexively close the article without reading even a word. And this is why the journalist was standing by a random residential intersection: because it is an intersection near the driveway of the church in question. Because the church is at the top of a hill; its driveway, a steep, winding cut up the hill. There is nowhere for the media crews to mill about, standing aimlessly, talking about whatever they talk about, except near the base of the hill.

And I know all of this geography—I recognized the residential intersection in the video thumbnail—because I, for a time, attended that church. I walked about the hallways of the first and second floors of the school, because that is where Sunday school was; I drove up that steep driveway; I passed through that intersection. I know all of those spaces, still, as well now as I did when I was there. It, Covenant Presbyterian, was my sole, and soul’s, refuge from working obscene hours in a hospital. It, as a church, was the most splendorous church I ever attended as a visitor. The beauty of the building, the worship, the people’s hospitality, was staggering. For over a decade, my memory has enshrined this precious church, and its precious parochial school, as the platonic ideal of what a Presbyterian church could be.

For around a decade, in the church’s infancy, they rented a space—some ugly gymnasium, something along those lines. And they saved, and saved, and saved. And then: they bought this undeveloped hilltop, hired a classical construction firm, and built a stunning, beautiful stone basilica; flooded it with natural light through stained glass; lavished it with a beautiful pipe organ; and filled it with beautiful stone and tile flooring, oak furnishings, a skilled choir, and so, so many happy families. And they built a school for the families. The pastor was one of the finest I ever sat under. It was this shining citadel of Truth, of Orthodoxy, perched atop a hill overlooking the urban sprawl.

Their sanctuary:
https://www.360cities.net/image/covenant-presbyterian-church-nashville-tennessee-usa

And that platonic ideal church is forever shattered by the reports of intermediate calibers, and the blood and death which stains that hilltop shall never be blotted out, shall never be ameliorated, never redeemed.

I still remember what their school uniforms look like. I can barely remember a single conversation I had even a day ago, so shattered still remains my mind from The End, but I can remember what their school uniform looks like.

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On the morning of the next day, Tuesday—after only sleeping two or three hours that night—I awoke, fitfully, to a phone call from a friend. I answer, and what comes through the receiver is not a greeting in return, but the purest sobbing. A beloved friend, a mother, who knew that I knew Covenant Presbyterian. Amidst the tears, her bedraggled words form: “Paul, have you, have you, the people who died, Paul, have you, do you know, have you read—”; “No, ____, I have read nothing”; “Do you want me to tell you? or, or you can read it?”; “Whatever you wish, ____”; “The pastor’s daughter, Paul, I know you so loved the pastor, Paul, she, she was 9, Paul…”

The first comfort, to my friend more than me, in these days of death: the pastor whom I sat under is not now the pastor. No, the pastor there now cannot be the man I worshiped under, for that pastor was not a man who, a decade and some change later, would now have a 9yo. I know nothing of the other victims, the other martyrs, and not accidentally so.

As my friend gathered up some degree of her composure, for she was soon to be gathering up her children to take them to [a Christian] school, she made two comments; and they are why I write this today. First, “Paul, I hate that I am ‘the one who cries’”; second, “Paul, it’s not just that I am so hurt and horrified, I, Paul, O, I feel this, it’s, Paul—this hatred. They are so evil. And I hate them.”

What I said to her in the moment is peculiar to her and thus shall not be rehearsed here. That having been said, I also must addend that this woman is the gentlest, most hospitable, generous, and mild-mannered person you might imagine.

To the first, I say: Jesus wept. Weep with those who weep. It is no weakness to weep over others’ sufferings, others’ martyrdoms, at the hands of evil.

To the second, I say, just as those in the rainbow alphabet soup coalition are so very fond of saying: Love Wins.

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An hour or two later after my friend’s phone call awoke me, an old friend of mine texted me out of the blue. Military dude. One of the finest men I’ve met. He didn’t know I knew Covenant Presbyterian. “Sending ******** straight to hell” was the text, and the attachment, bodycam footage from the Nashville PD officers who stopped the shooter. And, consciously absentmindedly, I hit <Play>. I know those hallways, those staircases… And they pass a bulletin board covered with photos of children’s faces, and it’s just like the bulletin boards looked over a decade ago, but with a lot more faces, now. The truly Good things in life do not change, after all: but only grow. And then they step around a twisted body in the hallway.

What struck me, watching that video a single time, only once, once being infinitely enough times, was that I felt nothing of horror or flinching at the pivotal moment: at the moment when she who so weakly lived by the sword died so weakly by the sword. The carbine raised, the corner rounded, safety clicks off, squeeze-squeeze-… etc.; and then the final shots from another, from a pistol, with no safety to click off.

My mourning of what was done to this beloved church (for make no mistake, the church and the school are one, structurally and otherwise) has been at a distance. I do not live anywhere near Nashville. And my empathy and sympathy swell to fill the cavity of loss. But let us not mistake such mourning for weakness. Christ, the strongest man, the truest Man, ever to live: He too mourned. Yet none might plausibly accuse Him of weakness.

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One sermon shines most clearly in my memory from my time at Covenant Presbyterian. The pastor was, with no small amount of zeal, commenting upon the feminization of the American Church. He was decrying the gross appeals to pathos, the overly emotional worship music, the elevation of women into roles of the clergy, and the driving away of masculinity from the Church. Using King David as a double type—a type of Masculine Man, and a type of Jesus Christ—the pastor condemned a Church in which strong, hearty, bold, and militant men were being sidelined and eschewed in favor of weak, obsequious acquiescence to cultural rot. He went on and on—like any good Presbyterian sermon, the sermon was over forty minutes long—but it was deft and facile and, most of all, True. As I recall, one of the hymns of that Sunday was Lead On, O King Eternal, with the organ thundering, the choir pouring out its SATB beauty.

Perhaps in the intervening decade, Covenant Presbyterian has slid away from such shining Orthodoxy. I know that many Presbyterians have, although I am also no longer one of them, so I usually pay them little mind. I do not presume to know one way or another; although I do like to think Covenant Presbyterian have stayed True. I simply know what the place was when I was there. It was Good, it was True. Their families, joyful and loving; their church, shimmering with life; their school, well—Beautiful.

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By necessity, by very definition, evil is weak; it can only parasitize, it can only prey upon, it can only subvert. Remember, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, that the blessed angel Abdiel passes amidst all of the devil’s encamped army without the slightest threat against him. Remember that evil is weak.

Remember that evil is so overly self-aware, so indescribably self-conscious, that, so absorbed in pride as it is, evil knows not even itself: evil’s is not a well-examined life, to borrow from Socrates (and it is not a life at all—only a death-in-life). Remember that evil does not know what evil does not know, and yet evil does not know that it does not know what it does not know, because evil believes itself to know all. Such faux omniscience is, after all, perhaps the animus of evil. And so as I wrote above: evil, to which Love is incomprehensible, cannot reckon the terror which might readily flow from Love. Love is a terrible Goodness. Many waters cannot quench love.

My friend, articulating that she has a growing hatred: she is not alone. What evil, what those who incarnate evil, cannot begin to imagine, is how much hatred is stored up against them by those who are Good. O yes, they make their pithy taunts, that “Yes, we are coming for your kids, and you can’t stop us,” etc., and they bask in the protections afforded them by the mass media conglomerates et al.; but they have not Love. It is all clanging gongs, meaningless noise; it is nothing. For they have not Love.

I see, increasingly, “threats” from the rainbow alphabet soup coalition, along the lines of, “We’re not going away; you’ll have to kill us,” things of that nature. Hand one of them a battle rifle: he is too weak to shoulder it. Hand one of them a Glock: so weak is she that, upon firing once, the pistol has a failure-to-eject from the slide spring overpowering her wrist. Contrast this with the stories one may read of a young mother who, to save her child, has lifted up a car; or of a soldier who, despite being shot in the head, continues to fight to protect his wounded comrades. Love Wins.

It is to no small extent that I am dancing around stating my exact thesis, as my exact thesis is so blunt, and candid, as to likely violate a ToS agreement somewhere. Allow me to give a dichotomy to speak less indirectly. There may be the most bent man imaginable, so warped and twisted from inviting evil into his soul, into making his hands the instruments of evil. He murders, and he delights in it, savoring the light departing from his victims’ eyes; it is a carnal affair to him. And one day, he elects upon the ruination and undoing of a woman, a wife, a mother. And just as he is beginning his work, he is discovered by another: the husband, the father, a good man. The husband will not hesitate for one moment; indeed, the husband’s very soul compels him towards the antithesis of hesitation. And the husband will feel nothing in that moment: nothing but Love. And the strength which shall flood the husband’s body shall be unto evil as the leading edge of an avalanche unto a dead and rotten tree.

Many, it seems, in the rainbow alphabet soup coalition, have now staked their claim of ideology: that theirs is that which they find worth dying for, much less, worth murdering for. But what they cannot imagine—for they have not Love—is an ideology which one might find to be worth Living for. The adoration of, the affection for, the Love of, Life—in short, Love itself—is of infinitely more strength than their petty murderous impulses. As Martin Luther once wrote (albeit in German), The body they may kill; God’s Truth abideth still.

What evil cannot imagine is that Love fears not death; and this is because what evil—which is death—fears most, is death. What evil fears most is itself. What of the Christian? What of the one enraptured by Love? St. John answers: perfect love casteth out fear.

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In the passage of time, it may be, and indeed often is, that Good men must beat plowshares into swords. That some in the Church decry this is shameful and heretical. But let those brave souls, those whose bodies are aflame with Love, take comfort in the teachings of Dante, as commented upon by Dorothy Sayers below [emphases hers].

The innocence thus regained can never be exactly what it would have been if Man had not sinned. God wastes nothing - not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is enriched by its experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past but in the most literal sense “makes it good”. The sin is not forgotten, either by God or by the soul: it is forgiven, and so made the occasion of a new and still more blessed relationship; redeemed Man is a creature more precious to his Creator than unfallen Man could have been.

Accordingly, in Dante’s Earthly Paradise, the soul has to drink of the twin streams of Lethe and Eunoë. The first destroys all memory of evil and the sin with it; the second restores remembrance of the sin, but only as an historical fact and as the occasion of grace and blessedness.
- Dorothy Sayers, Introduction to her translation of Purgatorio, 1955.

In order to best exercise Love, one may sometimes be called upon—and truly, I mean called upon quite literally and Divinely—to take up horrifying, terrible means, in order to effect the ends of Love. This is the heart of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical. Every man [and woman] shall be brought to account for those actions which were left undone, and those actions which were done. It can be a Higher end to execute the lower means. And the promise suggested by Dante is that all of the sin and wretchedness and horror of one’s life?—it shall be forgotten, and then only remembered, only glimpsed, as threads in the great tapestry of Love, of Providence. Love Wins.

In Psalm 58, David pleads, speaking of those who are evil, that God might Break their teeth… so that [t]he righteous… shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. Many would like to pretend such psalms do not even exist in the Scriptures; of those content to not immediately disavow such violence, so often is the quick rejoinder, “Well, sure, yes, that is the inspired Word of God, but, tut tut—remember that Vengeance is the Lord’s; Christians are to turn the other cheek, to lay down and die.” But there is another path. There is the path of St. Francis. There is the path of praying to be made an instrument of God.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

To those who might argue that this prayer agitates squarely for the lie down and die approach, I shall not tender a response. I think you are wrong: I’ve time for nothing else. The Christian conception of Love is of far grander, more protective, more encompassing, more fatherly, conception than mere, “be nice to people, probably.” Love is the upbuilding, the uplifting, of Life; Love is light against darkness, hope against despair, faith against doubt; Love is giving, Love—

is dying.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

And so, with David, I too cry out: Break their teeth, O God. But let us not be so abjectly faithless as to presume that God, even our God, mightn’t have want of faithful servants in all of His many works, not merely those works we deem pleasant and “nice.”

Love Wins.